I am not watching any of the NARAL, er, the NOW, er, rather the Democratic Convention (of Planned Parenthood).  (I'm having enough trouble sleeping as it is), but by now we all know that one of the planks in the Democrat platform this year is support for the sacred right to comprehensive women's health care (free abortions for all!)  This is, after all, the party of Barack Obama, who as an Illinois State Senator spoke and voted against the Illinois Born Alive Infant Protection Act (see http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2008/01/top-10-reasons.html) and New York State Representative Louise Slaughter, a woman so psychopathically pro-abortion that she sees every baby born alive as a lost opportunity (her office told callers that protecting the right to abortion was her main and only interest in Obamacare). I suggest they run proudly on this plank (stained red with the blood of infants), perhaps with a slogan like "Our support for abortion will never waver, even if the little tyke is a-wavering at you on the sonogram screen!"

C'mon, Democrats!  Stand up and be proud!  Stand up and shout "We love doctors who kill babies!" 

There's a bumper sticker for you.

Brace yourself.  The party of baby-killing and murderer-saving is having their quadrennial (is that the right word?) blizzard of B.S.  I tried to think of some way that an American who cares about truth and about his/her country can possibly enjoy watching this travesty.  I did think up an American classic, that is to say a drinking game.  My suggestion is this:  every time a speaker at the Democratic Convention says "tax cuts for the rich" ("tax cuts for the wealthy" would be good enough at my house bar, but you're free to rule on this vital issue yourself), everybody present has to down a shot.  With any luck, you'll be unconscious in about half an hour, and the great benefit of this is that it will keep you from risking brain damage listening to the later speakers.  Let's be honest -- listening to Debbie Wasserman Schultz has to cause more brain damage than a mere fifth of Tequila.



The fact that B.O. is even getting renominated shows just how far the Democrats have slipped from their historic peak.  After all, between 1828 to 1856 the Democrats won six out of eight elections, and to show how deep their lineup was back then, they won those six elections with five different candidates(Jackson, Van Buren, Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan).  One of the factors that made the Democrats of the mid-nineteenth century sharper and more patriotic than the Donk Brigades of today is that they refused to make the same mistake twice.  When they elected Franklin Pierce, they elected an other dark horse like Polk, but this horse turned out to be (let's ride the metaphor out) a mule at best, a donkey at worst, they refused to renominate him for a second term.  Pierce, being a small man with a big ego and a total inability to recognize his own failure, resentfully threw a stinkbomb of a final State of the Union into Congress, which sparked a furious debate between free-soil Republicans and pro-slavery Democrats, but it changed little.  Pierce, arguably the worst President before Carter and Obama, was gone in March.  When James Buchanan turned out little better than Pierce, he went into retirement, too, but with far more grace than Pierce exhibited.

In contrast, when Jimmy Carter ran the ship onto the rocks in the late 1970s, he still won re-election.  This was, however, all he won, as Ronald Reagan flattened him like an empty Billy Beer can in the 1980 election.  Jimmy has been more Pierce than Buchanan, indeed, he has been more Pierce than Pierce.  Pierce went away grousing.  Carter won't go away.  He is John Quincy Adams in reverse.  Adams, after losing his re-election bid to Andrew Jackson in 1828, went on to serve brilliantly in Congress, fighting for liberty and the freedom of petition guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.  Dim Jimmy has done more harm in his post-presidency than all other ex-presidents combined.

Now we have B.O. -- worse than Carter, worse than Pierce, for he is the first President of whom it can be credibly said that he is crippling America intentionally.  He will be renominated by acclamation at this convocation of clowns and scoundrels.  May his bid to finish the job of establishing "Socialism in One Country" in our land of liberty meet the same fate as Carter's bid to renew his "Reign of Error".

 

Back then, Carney was a reporter (of a sort, as the British would say) for Time Magazine.  Now he's the Press Secretary for President B.O.

 

Once a communist tool, always a communist tool.

I am an unwilling member of the union Workers United, a Rochester NY local affiliated with the SEIU crime syndicate.  Like many if not most of the remaining private sector union members, I am compelled to be a union member and to pay union dues to keep my job.  Under the "leadership" of Ron Piccone, a typically politics-corrupted union hack who slid into the presidency of the union by a devious maneuver that averted both a debate and a real vote by the members on whether we really wanted the former lock-step Democrat Political Director as our president.  Under the dubious leadership of this leftist half-wit the union of course is supporting nearly all if not absolutely all Democrats this fall -- meaning that they are supporting the party that keeps raising taxes and driving American companies and American jobs overseas.  How this benefits the American worker I am unable to discern.

You would expect a company with this kind of inspired leadership to do something stupid for Labor Day, and at this Workers United did not disappoint.  This year they decided to links arms with the "99%" in the cause of ... would be ungenerous of me to say in the cause of the right to exhibit one's greed and stupidity publicly?  After all, how could a labor union not benefit from linking arms with the PDL (the Public Defecation League)? 

I don't know if the Occupiers marched ("shambled" were perhaps the better word) in the parade with Workers United this year.  If so, pity the poor souls who were caught downwind of that odorous union.

Sometimes a blogger has to rewrite his posting before he starts writing it.  I was reading a blog posting by  Burt Prelutsky (http://www.burtprelutsky.com/2012/08/making-use-of-lemons.html), when I read this:

"Let me say that I can understand how someone can be a Democrat. After all, a lot of people simply accept the party affiliation they were born into, just as most of us accept our parents’ religion as our own. What I don’t understand is how liberals can stomach the recent TV commercial in which Joe Soptic,, a retired steelworker, lays the death of his wife at the feet of Mitt Romney. Are liberals so totally devoid of morality that they don’t object to being allied with a political party, long known for registering dead people to vote, stooping to desecrating a woman’s grave to help win an election?

In case you missed the back story, Mitt Romney left Bain Capital in 1999. Mr. Soptic was actually offered a buy-out by Bain before they were finally forced to close down the steel plant where he was employed. That was in 2001. What’s more, even after he was out of work, Mrs. Soptic still had a job and still had health insurance. In fact, it wasn’t until 2006, seven long years after Romney was entirely out of the picture, that she was diagnosed with cancer, dying shortly thereafter."

Now obviously for Soptic to blame his wife's death on Mitt Romney or Bain Capital makes as much sense as it would for me to blame my father's death last year on Obamacare's death panel, the Independent Payment Advisory Board. So when I sat down at the keyboard a few minutes ago, I had planned to write about Joe Soptic and the fact that while the sponsors of the ad have been pounded publicly (and rightly so), didn't Soptic have a responsibility to keep his own personal tragedy from being abused?  The evidence shows that Mitt Romney had not even a tangential connection to his wife's tragic death, so shouldn't he have told the Democrat SuperPAC that his story, honestly told, couldn't help them, and then hung up the phone?

As I said, that's what I planned to write.

However, I ran a net search on his name and found an article on the Washington Examiner (http://washingtonexaminer.com/joe-soptic-the-man-blaming-romney-for-wifes-death-is-a-familiar-face-on-the-anti-romney-beat/article/2504211#.UEUP8ZbF-uI) that made clear that Soptic perhaps isn't such an innocent victim as he makes out.  It turns out that he's been on TV attacking Bain Capital before, and the reason for his lying anti-Bain bitterness is that most classic of union-worker jihad-starters, his pension got cut by somewhere between $283 and $400/month (depending on which Joe Soptic TV appearance you choose to believe).

So Mr. Union Retiree has his pension cut by Bain Capital management trying to save his failing former employers, and so he lies in a political ad attacking a former Bain executive who had nothing to do with the cutting of the pension because he had left the company two years before the plant was closed and seven years before the doubly unfortunate Mrs. Soptic (I say doubly because she was married to Joe Soptic) was diagnosed with the cancer that was to kill her.  He's a male Cindy Sheehan.

Yeah, just call him Joe Septic. 

I made a prediction to my wife before the Republican Convention started.  I told her that the news media herd would peddle the same old yarn that they always peddle.  They would say that the Pachyderms are the rich white men party and that they hate everybody else -- women and other minorities (somehow you expect the herd and the other Democrats, being so bad at math, to fail to notice that women are the majority of Americans, and have been for years now), the poor, and everyone who isn't a rich white man.  I told her that any and every woman, every minority group member, and especially every both-of-the-previous speaker would vanish into the media video hole, and would be ignored as far as the herd could manage it.  It's the bias of omission, which the herd has used for years.  Dynamic Congressman J. C. Watts, a black conservative from Oklahoma (and former quarterback for the University of Oklahoma Sooners) was a featured speaker at the 1996 Republican Convention.  NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN (the herpes outbreak of the American news media, MSNBC, hadn't erupted yet) refused to show the young black conservative addressing the convention of the party that was formed to stop the spread of slavery across the American continent, in the belief that if slavery did not grow it would die.  They refused then as they refused this week to show Mia Love, Artur Davis, and Susana Martinez, and as they refused to allow their audiences to hear what these Republican office-holders or former office holder's (in Davis's case) have to say.  They are so committed to the lie that they have peddled all these years that they can't give it up now, no matter how much evidence piles up against them.  Once their audience realizes that they've been lying about this all of these years, they'll start exploring to find out what else they've been lying about...

Barack Obama is fanatically opposed to the 2nd Amendment.  No-one who knows his history can doubt it for a moment.  Of course, he's like Charles Schumer in that regard:  if they're going to push their entire socialist dictatorial agenda, they know they had better disarm the people first.  So how could he make a statement like this after the Aurora theater shooting:

“I, like most Americans, believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to bear arms. I think we recognize the traditions of gun ownership that passed on from generation to generation, that hunting and shooting are part of a national heritage,” Obama said in a speech to National Urban League, six days after the mass movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo. “But I also believe that a lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals; that they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities.”

He continued, “I believe the majority of gun owners would agree we should do everything possible to prevent criminals and fugitives from purchasing weapons, and we should check someone’s criminal record before they can check out a gun seller, that a mentally unbalanced individual should not be able to get his hands on a gun so easily.”  (From TheBlaze.com, which by the way is a very good news site.)

Jim Quinn of America's Morning Show thought he had covered this statement thoroughly, but he got hung up on the AK-47 reference in the statement and failed to notice the "presence of an absence".  Here's the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution; see if you notice what I noticed instantly:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Do you see it?  Our Constitution guarantees us the right to keep as well as bear arms, but BO does not believe that we have the right to keep them.  What he really said is that we have the right to bear arms -- in his army, under his orders, and at his discretion.  Meanwhile, he wants to keep those pesky arms under his control, in case we get any crazy ideas about liberty and the people controlling the government.

Alleged news reporter Brian Ross of ABC "News" renewed his title to infamy a few weeks ago when he implied that the Jim Holmes who shot all of those people at the Aurora theater might be the same Jim Holmes who has his own page on the Colorado Tea Party website.  It took very little research to prove that the two men were two very different men.  One glaring difference is the fact that the two men are roughly thirty years apart in age.  The question then became why a veteran news reporter like Ross would make such an obvious mistake.  Sloppiness and the hurry to make a "scoop" were the most frequent guesses.  (It occurs to me that Ross's "scoop" came up with the same contents that a scoop used to clea a cat's litter box comes up with.)

I don't buy it.

For one thing, this mistake was too obvious to be what is truly called a mistake.  ABC News surely knows how to access the Colorado Tea Party webpage, and personal pages have personal profiles.  Even if Ross is too stupid to check, his editors and the network news directors at ABC are not.  Anyone knows that Jim Holmes is a very common name, and that the odds were that these were two different men.  Furthermore, the news herd know full well that the only violent incidents involving Tea Party members have featured the TP members as the victims.  One of the things that frustrates the herd most about the TP is that they are so law-abiding that the herd has nothing to use against them.

Except lies.

It reminds me of the 2008 Presidential campaign.  The Democrats predicted that the Republicans would make BO's race an issue.  When the Republicans (who don't think that way anyway) refused to follow the Donks' script, the Donks and the herd simply claimed that they had. 

It is my contention that Brian Ross, George Stephanopoulos, and ABC News knew that they were airing a slanderous report, and aired it anyway.  What they were doing was launching a dirty political assault, and it had nothing to do with news reporting. 

They were intentionally slandering patriotic citizens who they detest, and the fact that they might be endangering the health or even the life of an innocent man and his family meant nothing to them.  After all, you can't make a revolution (and that's exactly what they're shooting for -- pun intended) without spilling some innocent blood. 

They did not make a mistake.  They were lying, and they knew it.

Since my book project has dwindled to an online voter guide idea, which may or may not ever "come off", I have returned to blogging, hopefully in time to be seen between the covers of a volume of my collected writings.

Since, however, much of our politics is ephemeral, both because of the twenty-four hour news cycle and because of the American public's ever-shortening attention span, I wanted to get my own time capsules planted someplace where they can be found later, so that my family, friends, and total strangers can see that I was thinking what I was thinking when I said I was thinking it.  I have little to be proud of as it is, but I have become a fairly savvy observer and predictor of events.  I don't want people to be looking at me like Al Gore gets looked at when he says he took the initiative and began what would become the Internet you're reading now.

May I offer a bit of advice?  While much of Wikipedia is fairly trustworthy and well-written, especially on history going back to World War II and before, it is most assuredly not to be trusted on recent history and current events, particularly on our present-day politicized scientific debates on "global warming" and the like.  May I recommend that you fill this gap with Conservapedia?  While it is younger and not as large as the older, liberal-edited Wikipedia, at least it's not edited by the normal liberal BSers trying to claim that Iran-Contra was not an attempt to overthrow our government, and it does admit the skill and dedication of the forces who fought to liberate the Cuban people from the increasingly bloody dictatorship of Fidel Castro.  Refreshingly, it also provides the crucial fact that John Kennedy crucially weakened the plan, withholding the air support that was so critical to the prospects of success of the mission.  Sports provides an expressive term for what John F. Kennedy (aka Mr. Profile in Courage) did at this crucial moment.  He choked.  As a critic stated at the time, JFK was "all profile, no courage".



I finally looked up the definition of dim sum.  According to Wikipedia "Dim sum refers to a style of Chinese food prepared as small bite-sized or individual portions of food traditionally served in small steamer baskets or on small plates."  I'm relieved.  I would have defined dim sum as the total of Obama and Biden's SAT scores.



Quick prediction:  The Democrats will do their not-exactly-on-the-level best to call off the Vice Presidential debate that the presidential campaign has featured at least as far back as 1984.  Do think any Democratic campaign consultant (Brian Williams, David Gregory, Diane Sawyer, et al) can sleep well at night after imagining Paul Ryan mauling Joe Biden in front of a national audience?  They had to struggle mightily to portray Biden as the winner against Sarah Palin in 2008, since they couldn't dishonestly chop up the tape like Katie Couric did to her interview with Palin.  (The amazing story is in the documentary Media Malpractice, and it's a jaw-dropping must-see for anyone who still believes that the major media is or even wishes to be an honest broker of electoral sweepstakes.)  They could try some of the shenanigans that they try during Republican Conventions, of course, like refusing to show or even admit that there are minority speakers at the podium, like they did to Congressman J. C. Watts a few conventions ago.  Since the whole point of televising  the debate is to hear what the candidates are saying, though, it would be just a shade too transparent a ruse to ignore Ryan when he's speaking "on the record".

If they can't wriggle out if the debate, though, every conservative talk show host and pundit in America will be eagerly awaiting the TV post-debate wrap-up, when the liberal broadcast teams will be trying to hypnotize their audiences into believing that they didn't really just see and hear what they thought they just saw and heard.

Good golly, Svengali!



Like most of you, I suppose, I spend my first few minutes checking my email cleaning out the spam from my emailbox.  While dumping my junk  mail yesterday, I saw one that invited me to "conference with naked teen BOOBS!"  Now, why would I want to confer with unclothed, underage Obama supporters?

... may I remind all readers that dim Todd Akin wafted to the Republican nomination to run for the Senate from the State of Missouri on a sea of Democrat money?  They knew that their nominee, incumbent Claire McCaskill, is such a weak candidate that she would lose even to a mediocre Republican.  However, they knew how to take advantage of the Republicans' astoundingly foolish primary rules, which allow voters to choose to vote in any primary they choose.So they ran false ads claiming that Akin was a sound conservative, crossed over to vote in the Pachyderm Primary, and pushed this self-infatuated dodo to the finish line ahead of two more formidable candidates.  Mission accomplished!  They had found the one Republican who could lose to McCaskill, who like Patty Murray has to be carried across the finish line every election (or in this case have the race fixed for them to win).

I also would like to suggest that Republican anti-fraud monitors watch Akin's bank accounts and other repositories of wealth.  I'd like to be sure that the Democrats aren't paying him to stay in the race.

If I recall Ann Coulter's devastating review of Bill Clinton's autobiography "My Life" (the publisher convinced him to drop "as a Lecher" from the end of the title) correctly, she said that the hardcover runs like a Chinese Water Torture, er, sorry, make that runs to 957 pages.  (The paperback runs a mind-numbing 1,024 pages.)  It occurred to me today that 957 pages are what emerged after the editing process.  Can you imagine how long the original manuscript was?  And how would you have liked having the task of editing that towering egotist's memoirs? 

That's a job this American would not do!



I watched some entertaining television last night.  I watched Book TV/After Words, last night hosted by Linda Killian of the Woodrow Wilson International Center.  (I can't be the only person here on TownHall to notice that "Woodrow Wilson" and Center" don't fit together.)  She had on as guests John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky, authors of the new book "Who's Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk".  Killian herself is the author of the book "The Swing Vote", which may never sell another copy after the thwacking she received from Fund and von Spakovsky on the program.  Never was the reason that the Sunday news programs (with the exception of Fox News Sunday) stack their panels with liberals more clear, as viewers watched the host of the show oppose the two guests with lie after lie, only to discover to her discomfiture that every lie met the fate of skeet at a world championship shooting contest -- it was immediately blown to bits.  A normal person could almost feel sorry for the victim of such an obvious mismatch, as the slow-thinking, unconvincing liberal would close her eyes, pause, and try to think of some way to make Fund and von Spakovsky look unintelligent and perhaps even dishonest, a task about as easy as trying to make Barack Obama look like an albino.  (I am not a normal person, of course -- I am a crab, so I found the sight quite amusing.)  Give yourself a treat.  C-Span 2 Book TV will re-air this liberal-mashing a few more times (the schedule is here )

Pop some popcorn, grab a drink, and watch the good guys score a knock-out.



Is everyone else as eager as I am to watch Paul Ryan, perhaps the smartest man in Washington, debate the Delaware Gaffe-o-Matic, Joe Biden, in the Vice Presidential debate?  I haven't watched one of the VP debates since 1984, but I'm sure I'll record this one.  It'll be a treasure.

The Middle East received another jolt this week when Syria threatened to use its chemical weapons -- perhaps in that perennial last resort of the Arab or Islamic scoundrel, a Jew-hater uniting strike at Israel.  Funny, isn't it?  When Iran works away at developing nuclear weapons, we hear about it for years seemingly unending.When Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist Iraq worked on their own weapons of mass destruction, the whole world knew, and fortunately for the world Israel took out the Osirak Nuclear Generator, with much of the world publicly condemning Israel's superb attack while privately heaving sighs of relief that might have moved sailboats across lakes.  When Iraq went on to start brewing chemical and biological weapons (I hate that mushy term "agents" in this context), the whole world suspected, and much of the world knew what the Hussainiacs were up to.

Yet I don't remember banner headlines announcing that Syria had a burgeoning chemical weapons program underway, do you?  Somehow they seem to have suddenly sprung from the desert itself, fully formed and ready to unleash terror and death.

The most important word in that last sentence was "seem".  I don't remember those headlines (which in fact did not see print), but I do remember other, decade-old headlines.  Syria may well have produced some chemical and biological weapons, but I'm betting that many of them, complete with delivery vehicles, came across the border with Iraq in long truck caravans that seemed to always be empty when they returned to Iraq.  Rather an odd foreign trade deal, particularly when the international "community" was demanding (read 'pleading') to be allowed to inspect Iraq's WMD manufacturing sites.  Newsmax, unfairly nearly forgotten today but for many years a top source of news that the modern Neville Chamberlain diplomats of the world would rather you never find out, reported that the Iraq WMDs did in fact exist, and that the Russians were helping sneak them into the Bekka Valley in Syria.  Now they have reappeared, those weapons that lying hack politicians like Johnny the Gigolo Kerry claimed never existed.  In truth, what never existed is the part of Kerry's brain that relays truth to his vocal chords.

The truth is that George Bush and many other country's leaders were right.  Saddam Hussein's Iraq did have both deadly and diabolical weapons and fertile contacts with international terrorist groups, and President Bush had every right to keep Iraq's blood-drenched regime from putting the former into the hands of the latter.  There are many so-called conservatives who do not have the courage to defend President Bush (either one, in fact) even when they were right. 

I am not one of them.  George Bush was right!

Bet on it.  While some of the suddenly menacing may have been home-brewed (and as home brew goes, I'd much prefer a Sam Adams), you can be assured that many if not most of the canisters have "Made in Iraq" stamped on them.

As I've been watching and listening to more and more facts come out about Operation Fast and Furious, in which BATF agents deliberately allowed illegal guns to "walk" across the Mexican border, where they were sure to kill hundreds of Mexicans, all to build a spurious case for more gun laws controlling gun shops (including many of the gun shops that reported the suspicious gun sales tp the BATF, which told them to process the transactions anyway), I've had an old suspicion shake off its gag and start whispering in my head again.  Are we really sure that the explosion of the Deep Water Horizon was an accident.  If the administration was willing to cause the death of hundreds, potentially thousands of Mexican citizens (along with at least one American law enforcement officer, Brian Terry) to advance their domestic gun control agenda, can we really absolutely absolve them from the suspicion that they blew up a deep-water oil rig in order to justify a moratorium on offshore drilling?


With this bunch in power, I believe that it is possible.  Do you?

Isn't it odd that some lefty pundits say that chief Justice John Roberts “saved” the reputation of the Supreme Court by voting with the lockstep-left justices, but they see this decision, a decision that threatens to destroy whatever remained of the liberties that our founders fought and suffered to hand down to their descendants, as being perfectly legitimate even though the deciding vote was cast by the very same Elena Kagan who developed the strategy used in the oral (and most likely written) arguments? How can that be legitimate?

If (God forbid) the court goes on to have a 5-4 liberal majority in the future, and starts tearing down our heritage of liberty and the rights of the individual, do you suppose that the same pundits who today say that every 5-4 decision in which the lockstep-lefties are in the minority is a the decision of a bitterly partisan majority will accuse the Gang of Five of the future of being equally partisan, or indeed partisan at all?

This, of course, is a rhetorical question.

Contrary to what's being published now, I believe this dreadful decision will at last put an end to the naïve belief that the Supreme Court and the judicial branch in general will protect our rights for us, and that therefore we do not have to protect them ourselves. This belief should have died with the decision of the court on the McCain-Feingold free campaign speech strangulation law, when the majority of the justices sided with the politicians against the people. Funny – when I was young (admittedly a long time ago), we were taught that liberals believed in expanding free speech. This concept died sometime in the 1990s, as uber-liberal Alan Dershowitz noted when he wrote “In today's America, the greatest threat to free speech is not coming from the Right. It's coming from the Left.”

Give up that fantasy, lovers of liberty. No-one is going to defend the freedoms we have left for us. If we're going to reclaim our rights, or even defend the ones we still have, we are going to have to fight for them ourselves.

The liberal fascists (not an oxymoron – read Jonah Goldberg's book of the same name) must be giddy with this decision. At the beginning of this noble experiment in self-government, the federal government largely left its citizens alone entirely. As the decades went by, the reach of the national government waxed and waned, but didn't immediately grow into a leviathan. Libertarian legend says that Abraham Lincoln was the father of big government, but this is twaddle, as by 1872 (only seven years after the shooting stopped) the federal government had shrunk back to its pre-war size.

As America was drawn into World War I, liberal icon Woodrow Wilson began to expand the powers of the government at the expense of liberty. Censorship grew, and this time the controls on behavior did not all come off at the end of the war. It's a pleasing irony to think that Eugene V. Debs, repeat socialist Party candidate for President, jailed for interfering with the draft and the recruitment for the Armed Forces (jailed for making a speech!), was not released by Wilson, either at the end of the war or even at the end of his term. He would have to wait to be released by that supposed disaster of a Republican President, Warren G. Harding, who answered objections to Debs' release on Christmas Eve of 1921 by saying “I want him to eat Christmas dinner with his family.” Typically, the socialists who edit Wikipedia do not give Harding credit for his rather touching statement. They also do not give Harding credit for actually inviting Debs to the White House the moment he was released from prison, an invitation that Debs accepted. After meeting with Harding, Debs pronounced Harding a kindly gentleman.

Take note, liberals. Liberal icon jails citizen for exercising free speech, and conservative Republican releases him.

As the decades went by, the number of actions that became crimes grew exponentially. After this, in a trend that many of us find appalling, the concept of “hate crimes” appeared. Now not only were our actions suspect, but our motives and thoughts as well. Many, including this writer, found the new trend in law disturbing, for it has long been a tenant of American jurisprudence that it was the act which was the crime, not the motive. By “hate crime” logic, it can be more of an offense (leading to greater punishment) to assault a 24 year old homosexual bodybuilder that to assault an 82 year old asthmatic grandfather. Anyone who doesn't see this as a howling idiocy is an idiot themselves.

Not satisfied with the partial subjugation of the American citizenry, we now have the real purpose of the Obamacare law, and its true purpose. Having already criminalized (and thus controlled) our actions, our thoughts, and our motives, they now move to control our inactions as well. Don't buy a product our self-proclaimed rulers demand that we purchase, and pay a fine or go to jail. Presumably, if you resist like free people often due, and you will be shot. Once they establish that principle, freedom in this country is over. Perhaps forever.

The leftists will be in La-La-Lenin Land, though. Their dreams will have have come full circle – as a noose around our necks.

I read a report the day after the Supreme Court handed down its execrable decision on the Destroying Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act that Governor Bobby Jindal declared that Louisiana still will not bow down to this infernal law. I hope he sticks to his determination, and I hope the other governors follow his lead. This decision carries no moral weight, and does not need to be followed. I have been waiting for three days for some big-time conservative commentor to point out why this is so, but no-one has, so I will.

This decision is of no legal or moral force because Chief Justice John Roberts (the new poster child for Beltway Fever) was not the deciding vote.

B.O.'s Solicitor General Elena Kagan was.

In one of the most flagrant cases of stacking the judicial deck in American history, Barack Obama placed his own Solicitor General on the Supreme Court. It was a more modest strategic move than FDR's infamous court-packing scheme in the 1930s or Jimmy Carter's federal court expanding of the late 1970s (less famous than FDR's scheme, this nearly doubled the number of federal court judges – all appointed by Democrat Carter, of course). However, this scheme of Obama's took court-packing in a new, dangerous direction, for it gave him another solicitor in the chamber. Not only would he have his official Solicitor General making the case for this freedom-crushing edict, but he would also have his “former” Solicitor filling in the gaps and correcting the mistakes in the official argument. Anyone who heard the oral argument of the case knows that Kagan was still representing the administration, and not impartial justice. Several times Donald Verrilli seemed to be losing ground defending the indefensible, and “former” Solicitor General Kagan would get him “back onto the rails”. Many commentors claimed that it has not been uncommon for Justices to suggest lines of argument to attorneys arguing before the court. Perhaps, but it is not common for the person who had been tasked with building the argument to be presented to the court in the future to then be placed on the court to here and rule on the argument that they themselves actually built!

I am frankly astounded that the same pundits who argued that Kagan must recuse herself from any role in any case stemming from the Obama-doesn't-care law because she had held the Solicitor General post in the administration during that crucial period when the legal strategy for defense was being formed all seem to have suddenly forgotten her name now that the decision is here. They mainly have targeted Chief Justice John Roberts for his seeming cringing turnaround, and indeed there is much to be criticized in his decision. (His decision, that is, to please the Beltway mob instead of defend the Constitution, which is his sworn duty.) Roberts' decision is at least apparently honestly wrought, but Kagan's very involvement was corrupting from the start.

I urge the governors of the states that joined together to oppose this monstrous law in open court to follow Governor Jindal's lead and declare that since the court which decided this case was not legally constituted to hear this particular case, due to the taint of partiality on Justice Kagan, their states are not obligated to respect this decision, and that they will not.

The future of America may depend on it.