This is where Dave's content would normally go

My days right now are like shoving ten pounds of crap into a five pound bag.  Thanks, Drum, for doing the yeoman's work.

Oh Dear Lord

The Dodgers lost, and they're out of the playoffs.

Now I'm going to have to spend my weekend dodging suicidal LA people who downed a handful of qualudes to drown their sorrows before they snorted handfuls of coke to wake up before they got into their cars to drive from where-ever to where-ever.

In other words, it'll probably be just like every other weekend on the roads here.  This place might not be Hell, but you can see Satan's front porch.

Of course he does

And it's not like the courts would actually rely on the plain language used by a bunch of old, white, privileged slave-owners, am I right?

Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to run for President

I mean, he was born in another country and served as Governor of the most populous State, so why not let him serve as President of all 50?

Well, Article 5, Section 2 of California's State Constitution only requires that the Governor be both a citizen of the United States and a resident of California, for the five years preceding the election.


The United States Constitution is a little more stringent. Article 2, Section 1, Paragraph 5:

No person except a natural born Citizen, ... shall be eligible to the Office of President;

Arnold was born in Austria, so that rules him out. Of course, given that the courts have repeatedly ignored the plain language of the Constitution on multiple occasions, I wouldn't be in the least surprised. And he's been thinking about it for a while, it seems...

Columbia University Law School professor Michael Dorf, an expert in constitutional law, said about the Governator’s case in 2007, “The law is very clear, but it’s not 100 percent clear that the courts would enforce that law rather than leave it to the political process.”

Oh, one other thing. If you cannot run for President, you cannot run for Vice-President*, either, although there have been numerous Senators and Representatives, and even Cabinet members who were foreign-born. (If disaster strikes, and they have to start figuring out who the senior Executive Department Secretary is, they would just skip over who is ineligible.) So he could get to attend meetings in the White House, and maybe even stay overnight a few times, but he won't get to live there...

* - Last sentence of the 12th Amendment: "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."

I've liked Jeff for years

so I tend to stop by his site a few times a day, even when he isn't posting, just because the comments are so great.

But he posts a wonderful link that will help us keep track of exactly what the Federal Government is doing. To you and I, and everyone we know, if you wanna be picky about it...

I'm not on Facebook, but I imagine a few of you are... Enjoy

One minor quibble is something that geoffb points out:

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.

Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down.
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down.
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

Instead of the poor guy having to go hat in hand asking for his debt limit to be raised, he simply writes a new debt limit amount on his contract himself and if the bankers can’t all agree to cancel it in a few days then it becomes the new limit.
Rinse, repeat, as needed until the walls fall down.
- See more at: http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=51586#sthash.AskiwoO9.dpuf

For all the bluster

It turns out that the Obama Administration is nothing but a bunch of software pirates, after all...

They were using a piece of software that was actually FREE to use, so long as the copyright notice was included in the page(s) where the software was to be used. Not hard, and it is quite easy to post such notices, especially when it's just a case of copy-and-paste.

But NNNNOOOOOoooooooo... they actually DELETED the copyright notice. But, in their infinite knowledge of how we should be doing things, they left in the internal comments that allowed the company to prove that the software is theirs.

Yeah, these yahoos should be handed control of our most private lives... the parts that are so private, it is actually one of the four protected classes of communication (husband-wife, priest-penitent, doctor-patient and lawyer-client). So private, that doctors are actively protected from having to report anything they learn from patients while testifying.

Until ObamaCare, that is.

Burn it down. Scatter the stones.

How long?

Okay, this one will be a little math-intensive, so you can skip it unless you want to skip down to the end, just to see how boned we truly are.

Okay, as of the writing of this column, the running National Debt is $16,963,909,000,000 ($16.96 trillion) dollars.

If we were to suddenly stop borrowing and started spending a million dollars per minute - every minute, round the clock, round the calendar, 24/7/365 - on paying off the principal amount (the interest is handled as a separate expense, so we are just talking about the principal), how long would it take to pay off that amount?

A million dollars every minute x 60 minutes in an hour x 24 hours in a day x 365 days in a year = 525,600 minutes (which is where the song title from "Rent" comes from, btw) x $1,000,000 per minute = $ 525,600,000,000, or $525.6 billion per year. Divide into the number above, and we get... (drumroll, please)

32 years and 14 weeks.

That'a more than a generation... That long ago, Diana Spencer was walking down the aisle at St. Paul's Cathedral to meet Prince Charles... Ronald Reagan had just nominated the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court... The Space Shuttle had celebrated its first space mission...

That's if we stop borrowing NOW and start paying it off at $1 million/minute. Slower means longer. Not stopping makes it worse.

What cannot go on forever, simply won't.

To make it even easier

Let's see if we can make the First Amendment a little simpler to understand

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 Simplest terms, brass tacks and bottom line, that means that the Government cannot tell you

1) what to think
2) what to say
3) who to say it to.

They cannot tell you, force you, or coerce you in any of your most personal beliefs, nor can they prevent you from giving voice to those beliefs, and they don't get to decide who you hang out with in order to discuss those beliefs.

They can limit conduct, especially if there is a clear and present danger of harm, and remember that a Democracy has the right and authority to fight back against actions that can harm it (pity the Weimar Republic didn't learn that lesson).

Lots of court cases have defined what limits can be placed on certain dangerous expressions (shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater, so-called "fighting words", intimidation, etc.), but absent the clear harm or threat of harm to another, the government does NOT get to tell you what to believe, what to say (or print out), and who your friends are. Those most basic of tenets must be defended.

And if it is a case of my neighbor trying to build a church on his property that crosses over our shared fence line, I would expect the police and courts to limit his expression insofar as it infringes upon my own rights, using force if necessary.

But what if it is the Government that is doing the infringing upon those rights? What fallback position do we have in those cases?

Relax, that's the next Amendment. Our Founders had just used all those "hunting tools" to kick out the most powerful Empire on the planet at that time.

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. -- Justice Alex Kozinski, Ninth Circuit Court, in his dissent to Silveria v. Locker

and
 

The very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government - even the Third Branch of Government - the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon. A constitutional guarantee subject to future judges' assessments of its usefulness is no constitutional guarantee at all. -- Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the 5-4 majority in District of Columbia, et al., v. Heller (2008)

Glendale Boy

Becomes youngest African-American Eagle Scout.

Good on 'im.  Making Eagle Scout is hard.  Doing it by the age of 12?  Unreal.

You want to know what the biggest help for him was?  I spotted it pretty early.

His name is James Hightower the Third.

His father's name is James Hightower the Second.

His mother's name is Lucretia Hightower.

Stable nuclear families produce good kids, as a rule.  Both his parents are active as Scout Leaders, based on the shirts they were wearing for the interview.  A nuclear family, setting good examples, produces good kids.  Eagle Scouts.  Leaders.

Now, compare this family to a majority of the EBT crowd that freaked out yesterday, and hazard a guess at how many of those folks come from families where they all share the same last name?

The Progressive mind in one paragraph

From a comment by Vox Day at his blog.

Phony is clearly one of the rhetorical crowd. He literally cannot learn from new information. That's why "Shut up, Tad" and "Go away, man talk" are valid responses for people like this. They simply have no ability to change their minds on the basis of information, they only change their minds in response to their changing emotions.

Phony will not change his mind on the subject unless someone he recognizes as his authority tells him to do so, and then he would very likely deny that he ever believed otherwise.

Doesn't that just perfectly capture how Progressives process information?  You can explain reality to a Progressive all day long.  You can point out the inherent flaws in their arguments.  You can use logic, reason, deductive reasoning, facts, numbers and statistics, and yet after explaining reality to a progressive you're met with "YOU'RE RACIST!" and they walk away convinced that they're the smartest people on the earth while you're a knuckle-dragging racist red-necked sister-humper.

Facts do not penetrate a Progressive brain.  Which is why they can look at Obama and call him their God, King and Savior, even while the economy tanks, American influence abroad is reduced to tatters, the military is being turned into a gutted, hollow shell of it's former self, our enemies act without any fear, and our former allies use the knives we've shoved into their backs to begin to severing ties to us.  Because you're racist.  And it's Bush's fault.

Seen all over the Conservative side of the web

Because it's that damn good.

A vet still serving his country by giving the barrycades back to the anti-American clown who ordered them put up around the WWII Memorial.

The pic is already going viral.  I'm just helping it along.

Yep

So much awesome in one piece, I don't know what to quote:

But the president who slept through the Benghazi massacre once again forgot that our military is not just an agitprop. Our soldiers really do put their lives on the line, and lose them — as did the one marine and four soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan last weekend. That made it all too real. When bereaved families were suddenly denied death benefits by our government, there was no hiding the fact that the commander-in-chief had, yet again, abandoned those who’d made the ultimate patriotic sacrifice. What’s more, this dereliction was nothing more than crass political calculation — or, as it turned out, miscalculation.

Public anger erupted and even the Associated Press courtiers were reduced to reporting a sharp drop in the president’s approval rating. Congressional Democrats scrambled and a superfluous, face-saving death-benefits law was enacted so the White House could try to pretend the president now had payment authority he’d previously lacked. Administration lawyers continue to mumble about how, though Obama felt really terrible about it, the perfectly clear POMA had been “too vague” to help military families in their time of need.

You know, there’s also a 1996 law on the federal books that makes it a felony to provide material support to terrorists. It’s not vague. In fact, it’s clear as a bell, according to the many federal courts that have applied it in sentencing scores of jihadist-abettors to hundreds of years in prison.

Don’t you find it strange, don’t you think the public at large would find it strange, that in a shutdown Obama has instigated in order to enforce the Obamacare law Americans don’t want, he so skews the rest of our law that his administration says we can fund al-Qaeda but we can’t fund the families of our war dead?

 Read The Whole Thing.