All posts by Mike

Civil Liberties, Politics

Guns and Booze

An appeals court has realized that there is actually a second ammendment in the Constitution.

In a 2-to-1 decision, a panel of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, ruled those provisions unconstitutional. The Second Amendment says, “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.”

The basic question in the case was whether the first clause limits the second one.

Most federal appeals courts have said that the amendment, read as a whole, protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias — in modern terms, the National Guard. But in yesterday’s decision, the majority focused on the second clause, saying that the amendment broadly protects the rights of individuals to own guns — an approach that has been embraced by the Justice Department and by some constitutional scholars

The former interpretation is pure garbage. It’s using the letter of the law to defeat the purpose of the law. Our founding fathers made it abundantly clear precisely what the Second Ammendment meant. The use of the word “militia” is a caveat to two principles: (1) some of the Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, opposed the creation of a standing army and wanted a free militia of armed citizens to be our line of defense; (2) the right to bear arms was given because of he creation of government militias — to prevent them being use to oppress the people.

If the Second Ammendment has been designed to give the state militia power, it would be the only part of the Bill of Rights that gives a power to the government, rather than taking one away.

If you oppose gun freedom, ammend the Constitution. But don’t go reading bullshit that isn’t there into it. For the first time in generations, the court has decided to uphold the Constitution. This is a good thing.

After I heard of this, I also heard of a program in Austin to curb under-aged drinking. What struck me was hat the puritan-in-charge said she wanted to change the attitude toward alcohol of those between 12 and 25.

Um, 25 year-olds can drink, even in this state. Especially in this state. Keep an eye on these jokers. Just like MADD, they are cloaking their temperance agenda in the rhetoric of stopping drunk driving and keeping booze from kids.

Politics

Stooping

You know, one of the response I get when I hit Anne Coulter for calling liberals fags, traitors and godless; something I hear when I disagree with Ramesh Ponnuru for calling the Democrats the Party of Death; a common thread when I call Sean Hannity out for his Enemy of the State routine is this:

“Mike, you asshole. Liberals do this all the time! When we tried to reform the school lunch program, they said we were starving kids! When we tried to reform Social Security, they said we wanted seniors to be eating dogfood! When we grow Medicare 7%, they say we’re slashing it by not growing the program 7.1%! They constantly paint us as heartless evil bigots and monsters who only care about empowering rich white people! And you know this is true because any liberal reading this blog is nodding his head sand saying, ‘But all that is true!'”

The thing is:

  • Not all liberals are like this. Barrack Obama, for example. Just because some conservatives call liberals godless doesn’t mean we all do.
  • Two wrong don’t make a right. We know better than this.
  • Illogical and name-calling are all many leftists have. But we have facts on our side. The school lunch program is bloated. Social Security is going bankrupt in a decade. Tax cuts have demonstrably grown the economy under Kennedy, Reagan and Bush II. The welfare system has been a disaster. Socialism has put Europe 20 fracking years behind us on the economic scale. Ten years ago, the conservative books were things like All the Trouble in the World or The Way Things Ought to Be or Freedom in Chains – or classical works like the Road to Serfdom or Freedom to Choose. These were books that used facts and logic to build up the conservative ideas of limited government, states’ rights and fundamental liberty. Look at today’s books. Just look at the titles — Godless, Party of Death, Deliver Us From Evil. Are these the heirs of Ronald Reagan?
  • Speaking of Reagan, did he ever engage in this crap? No, because Reagan was a master negotiator who knew that, no matter what liberals said about him, he had to work with them. He reserved his ire for the real enemy – the Soviet Union. When he called them an Evil Empire, it meant something. When you denounce liberals as the Party of Death, what do you then call terrorists? The Part of Mega-Death? And what does heavy metal music have to do with anything?
  • Reagan also realized that you win elections by giving people something to vote for, not something to vote against. Bush should have destroyed Kerry in 2004. But it was close because he didn’t have anything to run on – other than that Kerry was evil, I tells ya. Eeeeeevillllll!
  • If conservatism is ever going to rebound, it is not going to be from name-calling and creating a state of fear. It is going to be from thoughtful people like Andrew Sullivan, P. J. O’Rourke and George Will making coherent argument for conservative principles. It is not going to be from denouncing global warming, but from acknowledging its potential while cautioning about the uncertainties of science. It is not going to come from monster-under-the-bed stories about terrorism, but from an informed rational position that freedom must be defended from the barbarians. That’s the path. Let’s choose it!
    • Civil Liberties, Politics

    In The News

    Browsing the news….

  • I’m shocked, SHOCKED that the FBI is abusing the power given to them in the Patriot Act. Wait, you mean we can’t just punt our civil liberties and hope that the government will play nice?
  • Expect the left to go apeshit over Newt Gingrich having an affair during the Clinton scandal. Of course, Newt didn’t grope women in hallways, expose himself to an employee and lie under oath. But don’t expect that subtlety to show up on Daily Kos or Huffpo. It will also be forgotten how the Clinton “we need to end the politics of personal destruction” personal destruction machine was after Gingrich from day one, circulating an exaggerated story of him serving his first wife divorce papers on her hospital bed.
  • You know, when Bill Clinton slimed his opponent, that was bare-knuckle politics. When the Attorney General does it, it’s something else. I’m glad Bush has backed off and hopefully it will turn out that these are disgruntled ex-employees mouthing off. But I doubt it.
    • Culture War, Politics, Socialism, Taxes and Spending, The Nanny State

    Conserva-what?

    Mitchell fisks Novak. Novak is trying to argue that Bush is a conservative. This is apparently some definition of conservative I am not familiar with. Actually it is one I’m quite familiar with. It’s defined thusly:

    Whatever the GOP wants to do, by definition, is conservative.

    Hogwash.

    I’ll add my own reasons of why the Douchebag is full of crap:
    Continue reading Conserva-what? →

    Sports

    New Link

    One of the things I regret about losing my archive are my rantings and ravings about the Sports Media Twerps, otherwise known as SMTs. But I can find some solace here.

    Ah, it feels so good to have friends to share my suffering. Read his fisking on the Tom Brady issue. Or further down where he calls Bill Simmons out for a) six months ago, stating that DJ didn’t belong in the basketball hall of fame six months ago; b) after DJ’s death, castigating the HOF for not inducting him.

    But then, consistency has never been Simon’s forte. Unless it’s bashing Payton Manning.

    Civil Liberties, Politics, War on Terror

    Fascists, Slavers and Knaves, Oh My!

    Nice to know that the French never learn anything. Of course, our cops are, informally, trying to get the same thing here.

    Walter Williams takes the starch out of VA’s apology for slavery. I always love it when people apologize for things that happened 150 years ago.

    I’m sort of in the middle on the whole climate of fear thing. Yes, I agree that the threat of terrorism is overstated and the War on Terror is quickly becoming nothing but a pork barrell. But there is a very real threat. I think we could make ourselves much safer with a fraction of the money we’re spending now.

    Politics

    Guilty

    Well, Libby is going up the river. It will be interesting to see if he turns on the Vice-President after the Administration pretty much threw him under a bus. As we’ve learned with the Bushites, loyalty goes only one way.

    It’s going to be fun hearing the Right Wing spin this. Boortz was already on the case this morning, saying that Libby was convicted of having a bad memory. I’m sure the meme will quickly become that this is the media’s attempt to lose the War on Terror.

    One of the things to watch here is to see if Cheney steps down. With his recent DVT and this, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him step down and for Rice to move one slot up.

    Update: Both the Right and Left want to make this about Joe Wilson. Wilson – the self-important turd in this affair – is going to be appearing all over TV tonight and Limbaugh is wondering why Fitzgerald believed Wilson’s BS story, now discredited by the Congress.

    But this isn’t about Wilson. Wilson could have been and probably was completely full of crap. Paula Jones was full of crap, too. And that was irrelevant as to whether Clinton lied under oath.

    Libby has been convicted of obstructing justice and lying under oath. Whether he was lying and obstructing to get the truth out is irrelevant. We don’t judge crimes by intention; we judge them by action. Libby broke the law. And he’s getting what he deserves.

    Update: A reasoned defense of Libby can be read here. Don’t expect such lucidity form the Right. A contrary opinion, dispelling many Right-wing myths, is here.

    One thing I would agree with both sides on. Neither side really cares about whether a crime was committed or not. You don’t notice Libs demanding justice on Sandy Berger’s pants, for example. And the same conservatives that demanded Clinton’s be impeached think that this is fine.

    This is quickly becoming a purely political fight. And in that instance, facts and justice become side issues.

    Politics, Socialism

    Brief Thoughts on Walter Reed

    I must admit, I haven’t been keeping too close track on the Walter Reed business. But what I have read leads me to a few thoughts:

  • Jon Stewart is right. Is this Administration ever responsible for anything?!. They weren’t to blame for intelligence failures, too few troops, Katrina, 9/11, North Korea, pork spending, the Abramoff scandal, the deficit, Abu Graib, any negative results of rendering and now Walter Reed. When Clinton did this, Rush Limbaugh joked that he should adapt the motto: “The Buck Never Got Here!”. Where is he on this Administration? “What buck? There’s no buck. This is just a political ploy by liberals/Democrats/drive-by media/Andrew Sullivan to wound this Administration and encourage the terrorists. Besides, someone else was responsible for that buck.”
  • The good news about Walter Reed is that soon, we will be able to achieve this level of care once socialized medicine is here.
  • Oh, Mike, you say. Oh, no. Check this out.

    To see this we need only look at the Department of Veterans Affairs. I happened to have lunch with Sen. Hillary Clinton recently. When I went into one of my usual libertarian rants about free markets, Ms. Clinton cited the VA as an example of government success. Indeed, under her husband’s administration, the Veterans Health Administration came to provide the “best care anywhere,” according to The Washington Monthly. Great.

    Maybe Hillary will shut her yap about the VA being such a wonderful model for the rest of the nation.

    • So watch that footage of rats and buildings falling apart and sleep well knowing that soon we will all be able to enjoy “the best care anywhere”.

    Politics, War on Terror

    War of Words on War Waste

    James Taranto tries to split hairs on the McCain-Obama wasted remarks.

    What’s odd about this is that waste and sacrifice are opposites. To sacrifice is to give up something of value to oneself for the sake of something more valuable that transcends the self. To waste is to give up something of value for the sake of something of lesser or no value. A sacrifice is an unselfish act; a waste is an act of misdirected selfishness.

    If a young man goes out, gets drunk, gets behind the wheel of his car, crashes and dies, it is fair to say he has wasted his life. That’s quite different from a young man who loses his life in the course of doing dangerous work in the service of his country.

    I think he’s missing the point. It is possible for a life to be both sacrificed and wasted. The Aztecs used to sacrifice men to their gods. In many cases, these men went willingly to their deaths, bravely sacrificing their lives so that the Aztec nation would get rain or abundant crops or victory against the Spaniards. But we know these lives were wasted because statues don’t win wars or bring rain.

    The men who died in Pickett’s Charge, the men who died at Galipoli, the men who died in the Marianas Turkey Shoot – they made brave sacrifices. But their lives were wasted by their leaders. I don’t think it’s ridiculous to suggest that George Bush’s incompetence has wasted 3,000+ lives.