Lies my teacher told me

I am not sure who originated this whopper, but there is no such guarantee in the US Constitution.

Freedom of Association.

And in any case it would only bind the general government.

Land of the free, home of the brave

Mozilla boss quits following gay row

Wow.

What is there to say?

Right now, one of the hottest demands of gay rights advocates is federal protection against getting fired for something gay-related.

Neither they nor anyone else on the left want federal protection for all against being fired for anything free-speech related.

No liberal Supreme will ever find anything in the constitution to protect people from being fired for having or expressing illiberal ideas, though they find plenty to protect their client victim groups.

And back in the day, when the shoe was on the other foot, they did everything they possibly could to protect reds.

The Goldilocks rule

Cameron on Farage and Clegg

One is too hot, the other is too cold, but I am just right.

A federal law against cock-fighting? No, against attending a cock-fight.

After attending pro-cockfighting rally, Senate candidate Matt Bevin says it's a state issue

Says the story,

As the Herald-Leader reported in February, McConnell enraged cockfighting enthusiasts when he voted earlier this year in favor of farm legislation that contained an amendment making it a federal crime to be a spectator at an animal fight.

In response, a McConnell spokesman said a representative of the senator's would be willing to sit with the group and hear their concerns.

The new law makes attending a cockfight or dogfight a federal misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison and $100,000 fine.

It makes bringing a minor to such fights a federal felony, punishable by up to three years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Why is that a crime?

Why is that a federal crime?

How is it even remotely possible that this is a federal crime?

Under what power of congress is this a federal crime?

Who put it into the farm bill?

Arrest him, try him, and hang him

US outrage at Iran 'hostages' envoy

The parts of government past Republicans have loved - the national security parts - are the parts that are least to be trusted

CIA lied about torture to justify using it

Not to mention that the argument from the Bomb never once really applied, or was even alleged to apply.

And recall that it was the Bushies and the neocons of the White House who invented all this.

Not just the NSA craziness lately exposed by Snowden and denounced by pretty much everybody outside the White House, but the torture.

But I must admit I have no confidence in any official study concluding the inefficacy of torture. 

Humbug.

Bien-pensant humbug.

A First Amendment Issue? Not.

SCOTUS Strikes Cap On Campaign Contributions From Super Donors

Money isn't speech.

Paying someone else to speak or publish isn't speaking or publishing.

There are no content restrictions on the press in these spending limits.

Nor in any way on what one may say.

Neither speakers nor publishers are restrained by these spending limits.

And how are the separate limits OK but the aggregate limit not?

The levels of scrutiny adverted to, by the way, are not a creation or an imposition of the constitution.

Judges just made all that stuff up.

A cynic once pointed out that the law says what the judges say it says.

And that is most certainly an argument against a life tenured, independent judiciary armed with final authority on the matter, isn't it?

The point of a written constitution is not only to create a government but to impose limits on what it can do, as well as in some cases requirements on what it must do.

The point is to protect the governed from absolute, arbitrary, and lawless power.

That point is in a measure defeated by the absolute, arbitrary, and lawless power of a runaway judiciary that gets to make up out of whole cloth the limits and requirements that the government must satisfy.

PS.

Protection of the governed from absolute, arbitrary, and lawless power is the real point of numerous features common among Western governments, especially but not only those that are republican, all of which are standing rebukes to absolutism.

These including but are not limited to separation of the executive, judicial, and legislative powers, the division of executive, legislative, or judicial power among several people or bodies of people, exercise of authority by distinct and independent levels of government (federalism), more or less frequent rotation in office for at least some of the most important offices, express and specific grants or denials of powers, a Bill of Rights, constitutional review by one or more bodies at one or more levels, trial by jury, and the right to an attorney.

A world of one?

We are all solipsists, so to speak.

Assuming I am not really the only one.

Think of Leibnitz or Berkeley, and the pre-established harmony.

Without anyone to pre-establish it.

And, following Hume, without really any one to be the only one.

Anyway, we take the experience of others entirely on faith.

Their pleasure, their pain, their whole inwardness.

Without which they are not.

Where do people get such “opinions”?

Marriage equality and judicial unactivism

One of these things is not like the other, no matter how hard liberals pretend they are the same.

Interracial marriage is and always was marriage, legal or not.

Same-sex marriage is merely a travesty.

All the same, play through and look at the Gallup pages.

Where do people come up with such replies about so many things that are none of their concern?

What do they even think they are being asked?

Are they being asked for a moral opinion?

An opinion as to God’s will?

A preference regarding what other people do, or are allowed to do?

A preference regarding what they themselves are allowed to do - about what is left up to them?

And note the effrontery with which dreaminonempty casually supposes the Supremes ought to be “out in front” of public opinion, foisting constitutional nonsense on society for the advancement of liberal political causes.

The Republican alternative to Obamacare?

Fox News Host Grills Lindsey Graham About GOP's Missing Obamacare Alternative

About the same as the Republican alternative to public education or the Republican alternative to Medicare or Medicaid.

To the extent that they are serious they are for abolition of all these things.

That is their “alternative.”

Odd that an interviewer on Fox News either doesn’t get that or was trying to force Graham to own up to it, personally, on screen, in just so many words.