Our red-line setting but ignoring POTUS (which used to denote the President of the United States) is at it again.
After more than 18 months of repeated extensions (and numerous concessions to the ayatollahs) in negotiations with Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weapons, no agreement has been reached on even a framework for further negotiations. Despite prior assurances that there would be no further extensions of the framework talks our POTUS is again extending what he previously represented to be a firm March 31 deadline.
Among the unresolved items, according to The Wall Street Journals, are such details as the pace at which sanctions against Iran would be removed, the scope of Iran's future nuclear work, and the ability of international inspectors to access Iran's nuclear and military sites.
Is it any wonder that there are among us an increasing number of folks who view the POTUS acronym as having come to denote a Piece of Totally Useless S _ _ t?
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Stacking the Judicial Deck
Eleven U.S.Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges are going to decide whether ordinary Californians are going to be able to carry guns to defend themselves.
The Circuit's current chief judge will be one the panel's members. Its other 10 members supposedly will be chosen at random from the Circuits other 25 sitting judges not recusing themselves.
The joker in the panel is that the chief judge already has voted on the matter. He was the dissenting vote in the 2--to -1 vote of the three-judge panel upholding the right of citizens to carry arms. He also voted to require the rehearing of the case by the 11 judge panel that he obviously hopes will vindicate his prior votes in the case.
Thus the right-to-carry starts out with one nay vote.
Does anyone think this is fair?
Keep in mind that individuals who are supposed to be addressed as honorable rarely merit that appellation. By and large they are not bound by the rules they impose on the rest of us.
Two interesting side points:
* Any black-robed elitist judge who wishes to do so can get a permit to carry concealed weapons, and many of them do so. Of course their lives are more important than ours.
* On his first day as a judge, a former law partner of your not-at-all humble blogger who had been appointed and approved to take the bench was visited by a police officer carrying a large piece of luggage. The bag contained a collection of firearms from which the newly seated judge was invited to select one or more (at no cost) with which he might wish to defend himself if there should be a perceived need to do so. He was advised that the collection was made up of weapons that had been seized and confiscated from their owners who were deemed -- though usually not adjudicated -- to be ineligible to possess or carry them.
Those holding a position that carries with it the right to be addressed as honorable (as well as their cronies and supporters), celebrities (even those who have been convicted of felonies), and big political campaign donors constitute one class of citizens . . . and their well being is important and entitled to protection.
As for the rest of us . . . . Oh well.
The Circuit's current chief judge will be one the panel's members. Its other 10 members supposedly will be chosen at random from the Circuits other 25 sitting judges not recusing themselves.
The joker in the panel is that the chief judge already has voted on the matter. He was the dissenting vote in the 2--to -1 vote of the three-judge panel upholding the right of citizens to carry arms. He also voted to require the rehearing of the case by the 11 judge panel that he obviously hopes will vindicate his prior votes in the case.
Thus the right-to-carry starts out with one nay vote.
Does anyone think this is fair?
Keep in mind that individuals who are supposed to be addressed as honorable rarely merit that appellation. By and large they are not bound by the rules they impose on the rest of us.
Two interesting side points:
* Any black-robed elitist judge who wishes to do so can get a permit to carry concealed weapons, and many of them do so. Of course their lives are more important than ours.
* On his first day as a judge, a former law partner of your not-at-all humble blogger who had been appointed and approved to take the bench was visited by a police officer carrying a large piece of luggage. The bag contained a collection of firearms from which the newly seated judge was invited to select one or more (at no cost) with which he might wish to defend himself if there should be a perceived need to do so. He was advised that the collection was made up of weapons that had been seized and confiscated from their owners who were deemed -- though usually not adjudicated -- to be ineligible to possess or carry them.
Those holding a position that carries with it the right to be addressed as honorable (as well as their cronies and supporters), celebrities (even those who have been convicted of felonies), and big political campaign donors constitute one class of citizens . . . and their well being is important and entitled to protection.
As for the rest of us . . . . Oh well.
Jounalists' Anti-Gun Bias Beats Logic
Lamestream journalists again are demonstrating how their lockstep anti-gun bias leaves them curiously lacking the curiosity and strangely stripped of the skepticism that used to be a foundation of the fourth estate.
Over the past month the traditional media outlets have been trumpeting the results of a couple of obscure polls that purported to reveal a record decline in the percentage of American homes in which the residents has firearms.
Never mind that the polls had been conducted by telephone and that gun owners might lie because of a reluctance to share information about their guns to a strange who called them. And ignore the fact that the same outlets chose not to report better recognized polls that showed exactly opposite results.
But even a dim bulb journalouse might be expected to question what happened to all the guns that previously were kept in the nation's homes. Did all those durable firearms somehow vaporize or otherwise disappear into the atmosphere? And how did those media outlets reconcile their triumphant reporting with the fact that firearms sales reached record high levels in 2013 and 2014?
The nation's press lords appear not to care about the credibility that they sacrifice by churning out blatantly illogical reports to push their ideological views.
Over the past month the traditional media outlets have been trumpeting the results of a couple of obscure polls that purported to reveal a record decline in the percentage of American homes in which the residents has firearms.
Never mind that the polls had been conducted by telephone and that gun owners might lie because of a reluctance to share information about their guns to a strange who called them. And ignore the fact that the same outlets chose not to report better recognized polls that showed exactly opposite results.
But even a dim bulb journalouse might be expected to question what happened to all the guns that previously were kept in the nation's homes. Did all those durable firearms somehow vaporize or otherwise disappear into the atmosphere? And how did those media outlets reconcile their triumphant reporting with the fact that firearms sales reached record high levels in 2013 and 2014?
The nation's press lords appear not to care about the credibility that they sacrifice by churning out blatantly illogical reports to push their ideological views.
Monday, March 16, 2015
Selma to Ferguson: A Bridge Too Far?
Americans of all hues and stripes last week were justifiably remembering the 1965 police repression of civil rights marchers in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named, ironically, for a Confederate general and erstwhile chieftain of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. The confrontation, killing one and injuring many, was the Bloody Sunday that helped trigger the ensuing civil rights legislation providing equal protection for blacks in official America.
But, once the call for "free at last, free at last" was constitutionally registered, is it fair for all Americans now to ask, fifty years later, what black Americans have done with their vociferously and widely welcomed "freedom." Or, more to the point, what has been done to them by a liberal America in the name of "racism?"
Simultaneously with the Selma commemorations has been the acrimonious happenings in Ferguson, Missouri, where, following the exoneration of a police officer who shot to death a black teenager, we now see a Department of Justice indictment of the entire Ferguson police department for systematic racial prejudice.
The shooting in Ferguson was followed by a similar police shooting of a black youth in Madison, Wisconsin, where various press reports show the victim there to hardly have been a mere innocent, whether "armed" or not. (Associated Press, March 9).
What questions do the American public deserve to ask in response to these incidents and in other American cities, where not only have local citizens been killed by police acting presumably in the line of duty, but where police officers themselves have been murdered? What is it that drives the interface between "unarmed black youths" and police forces?
Today there is a growing crescendo of authoritative writers and observers who are much more conversant with the condition of black Americans than most of us, including this writer, who are determined to acknowledge the social devastation that generations of government "benevolence" has wrought on black society, a crescendo which take us in a much different direction than "police brutality." Why, these voices are stridently asking, and answering, have Ferguson and Madison followed the promise of Selma?
Shelby Steele (National Review, March 9) vividly describes his confrontation with a mostly white American audience whose members refuse to acknowledge the weakening of personal responsibility and work ethic in black communities and the resultant underachievement, preferring instead to concentrate on a "moral relativism" that "disassociates" personal behavior - social, sexual and academic - from the group failure that characterizes so many black communities. For Steele, it is the "liberal, post-civil rights" era that has exonerated blacks from any culpability for this systemic failure. We "cannot blame the victim," the liberal mantra insists, but must look only at America's historic repression of blacks for both the cause and the answer of this failure.
Jason Riley, author of "Please Stop Helping Us," examines the disintegration of the black family - notably the eradication of fatherhood - that is responsible for a black culture that rejects personal achievement and academic and social progress among black youth. (Imprimis, January, 2015). For Riley, Ferguson is the epitome of a "false anti-cop narrative" that refuses to acknowledge the aberrant behavior of black males for the disproportionate black crime statistics, crime that pits mostly black against black rather than an artificial "white racism." It is the liberal Left today, composed of white and black leaders, cashing in on "white guilt" for generating lavish welfare expenditures that control the very civic and welfare institutions in black communities that insist on replacing traditional notions of responsibility with mantras of "self-expression" and "victimhood." Riley reaches into distant black history - the histories of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglas - voices that early on demanded black responsibility and self-help rather than the exaggerated and destructive "government benevolence" of today.
Walter Williams has written extensively over the years describing the devastation that low expectations of black Americans has had on black urban culture. "Racial discrimination" has much less to do with the crime, poverty and squalor of black communities than do Democratic and black politicians who drive the civil rights agenda. Being a "35-year old grandmother" and rarely seeing fathers and husbands in the community is a guarantee for school dropout, poverty and crime, none of which has anything to do with "racial discrimination." For Williams, it is the civil rights leaders and the "liberal elite," black or white, who benefit politically and financially by keeping black Americans in a "constant state of grievance" based on alleged racial discrimination. Add "academics and the news media" to the list of culprits and you have Williams' full retinue of the enemies of black Americans.
Thomas Sowell, a professional economist and perennial éminence noire for liberal America, consistently points to the economic results of a collapsed black minority culture. Comparing the early black leaders, including those at Selma fifty years ago, as the "noble souls" of the civil rights movement to today's "shameless charlatans," he looks at the reverse discrimination of today as a cynical payback for past injustices. He cites demands such as minimum wages and unqualified loans and mortgages simply as the left's investment in "black failure" which we see today in the breakdown of the family, abolition of fatherhood and academic underachievement. Ferguson, for Sowell, is the epitome of the "disparate impact racket" that has driven so much reverse racism. The Department of Justice's condemnation of the Ferguson police department he condemns as "statistically reckless." When a population anywhere is three-fourths black, it is likely that the number of driving citations will reflect that arithmetic (National Review, March 10).
Dr. Ben Carson is poised to interject "reverse discrimination" directly into presidential politics and seems determined to challenge the narrative of "white guilt." As a potential presidential candidate, he is referring to the social breakdown in black communities and welfare dependency reminiscent of Mitt Romney's "47%" two years ago, perhaps this time more persuasively.
Juan Williams on Fox News (March 8) calls for applying the same "moral clarity" that has long enabled us to understand the original civil rights movement and the Bull Connors of yesteryear that triggered it, to an understanding of the role of "black people" today that it ostensibly represents, as nothing more than a "special interest group" on behalf of "Democrats." For him the onus of "moral clarity" falls on today's black leadership that ignores the family breakdown, crime and bad schools. "White guilt" no longer carries the civil rights movement to the "next plateau" of equality.
The sum of these voices paints a picture of generations of Americans hopelessly locked into a dependency cycle from which they can never escape, generations of American citizens who will never be able to add constructively to society.
Historians one day may acknowledge an "anti-discriminationism" ideology that lies behind it all, an "ism" as destructive of modern societies as were the "isms" of yesteryear that devastated the societies of earlier times.
If Selma today represents anything, it is a metaphor of opportunity squandered, a false notion of "freedom now" that has stripped Americans of all descriptions of the moral and civic guidelines and sense of personal responsibilities that make any society work.
So, just where has the Selma bridge led to, not just for black Americans but for all of us together? And how, the obvious question is, should police departments react when confronted by communities hostile to the very civic and social institutions they are hired to protect?
British composers Gilbert and Sullivan, astute observers of the plight of 19th century British policemen facing the urban turmoil of their Victorian England captured the dilemma with their masterly wit by complaining that:
When constabulary duty's to be done,
to be done,
a policeman's lot is not an 'appy one.
To gauge the role of overly-challenged police forces today, one might ask what would happen if every police force in the USA at a given time on a given day went on strike for one hour? What would we learn?
. . . Whitney Galbraith
Colorado Springs
But, once the call for "free at last, free at last" was constitutionally registered, is it fair for all Americans now to ask, fifty years later, what black Americans have done with their vociferously and widely welcomed "freedom." Or, more to the point, what has been done to them by a liberal America in the name of "racism?"
Simultaneously with the Selma commemorations has been the acrimonious happenings in Ferguson, Missouri, where, following the exoneration of a police officer who shot to death a black teenager, we now see a Department of Justice indictment of the entire Ferguson police department for systematic racial prejudice.
The shooting in Ferguson was followed by a similar police shooting of a black youth in Madison, Wisconsin, where various press reports show the victim there to hardly have been a mere innocent, whether "armed" or not. (Associated Press, March 9).
What questions do the American public deserve to ask in response to these incidents and in other American cities, where not only have local citizens been killed by police acting presumably in the line of duty, but where police officers themselves have been murdered? What is it that drives the interface between "unarmed black youths" and police forces?
Today there is a growing crescendo of authoritative writers and observers who are much more conversant with the condition of black Americans than most of us, including this writer, who are determined to acknowledge the social devastation that generations of government "benevolence" has wrought on black society, a crescendo which take us in a much different direction than "police brutality." Why, these voices are stridently asking, and answering, have Ferguson and Madison followed the promise of Selma?
Shelby Steele (National Review, March 9) vividly describes his confrontation with a mostly white American audience whose members refuse to acknowledge the weakening of personal responsibility and work ethic in black communities and the resultant underachievement, preferring instead to concentrate on a "moral relativism" that "disassociates" personal behavior - social, sexual and academic - from the group failure that characterizes so many black communities. For Steele, it is the "liberal, post-civil rights" era that has exonerated blacks from any culpability for this systemic failure. We "cannot blame the victim," the liberal mantra insists, but must look only at America's historic repression of blacks for both the cause and the answer of this failure.
Jason Riley, author of "Please Stop Helping Us," examines the disintegration of the black family - notably the eradication of fatherhood - that is responsible for a black culture that rejects personal achievement and academic and social progress among black youth. (Imprimis, January, 2015). For Riley, Ferguson is the epitome of a "false anti-cop narrative" that refuses to acknowledge the aberrant behavior of black males for the disproportionate black crime statistics, crime that pits mostly black against black rather than an artificial "white racism." It is the liberal Left today, composed of white and black leaders, cashing in on "white guilt" for generating lavish welfare expenditures that control the very civic and welfare institutions in black communities that insist on replacing traditional notions of responsibility with mantras of "self-expression" and "victimhood." Riley reaches into distant black history - the histories of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglas - voices that early on demanded black responsibility and self-help rather than the exaggerated and destructive "government benevolence" of today.
Walter Williams has written extensively over the years describing the devastation that low expectations of black Americans has had on black urban culture. "Racial discrimination" has much less to do with the crime, poverty and squalor of black communities than do Democratic and black politicians who drive the civil rights agenda. Being a "35-year old grandmother" and rarely seeing fathers and husbands in the community is a guarantee for school dropout, poverty and crime, none of which has anything to do with "racial discrimination." For Williams, it is the civil rights leaders and the "liberal elite," black or white, who benefit politically and financially by keeping black Americans in a "constant state of grievance" based on alleged racial discrimination. Add "academics and the news media" to the list of culprits and you have Williams' full retinue of the enemies of black Americans.
Thomas Sowell, a professional economist and perennial éminence noire for liberal America, consistently points to the economic results of a collapsed black minority culture. Comparing the early black leaders, including those at Selma fifty years ago, as the "noble souls" of the civil rights movement to today's "shameless charlatans," he looks at the reverse discrimination of today as a cynical payback for past injustices. He cites demands such as minimum wages and unqualified loans and mortgages simply as the left's investment in "black failure" which we see today in the breakdown of the family, abolition of fatherhood and academic underachievement. Ferguson, for Sowell, is the epitome of the "disparate impact racket" that has driven so much reverse racism. The Department of Justice's condemnation of the Ferguson police department he condemns as "statistically reckless." When a population anywhere is three-fourths black, it is likely that the number of driving citations will reflect that arithmetic (National Review, March 10).
Dr. Ben Carson is poised to interject "reverse discrimination" directly into presidential politics and seems determined to challenge the narrative of "white guilt." As a potential presidential candidate, he is referring to the social breakdown in black communities and welfare dependency reminiscent of Mitt Romney's "47%" two years ago, perhaps this time more persuasively.
Juan Williams on Fox News (March 8) calls for applying the same "moral clarity" that has long enabled us to understand the original civil rights movement and the Bull Connors of yesteryear that triggered it, to an understanding of the role of "black people" today that it ostensibly represents, as nothing more than a "special interest group" on behalf of "Democrats." For him the onus of "moral clarity" falls on today's black leadership that ignores the family breakdown, crime and bad schools. "White guilt" no longer carries the civil rights movement to the "next plateau" of equality.
The sum of these voices paints a picture of generations of Americans hopelessly locked into a dependency cycle from which they can never escape, generations of American citizens who will never be able to add constructively to society.
Historians one day may acknowledge an "anti-discriminationism" ideology that lies behind it all, an "ism" as destructive of modern societies as were the "isms" of yesteryear that devastated the societies of earlier times.
If Selma today represents anything, it is a metaphor of opportunity squandered, a false notion of "freedom now" that has stripped Americans of all descriptions of the moral and civic guidelines and sense of personal responsibilities that make any society work.
So, just where has the Selma bridge led to, not just for black Americans but for all of us together? And how, the obvious question is, should police departments react when confronted by communities hostile to the very civic and social institutions they are hired to protect?
British composers Gilbert and Sullivan, astute observers of the plight of 19th century British policemen facing the urban turmoil of their Victorian England captured the dilemma with their masterly wit by complaining that:
When constabulary duty's to be done,
to be done,
a policeman's lot is not an 'appy one.
To gauge the role of overly-challenged police forces today, one might ask what would happen if every police force in the USA at a given time on a given day went on strike for one hour? What would we learn?
. . . Whitney Galbraith
Colorado Springs
Its All News to Our Prez
Does Anybody Report Anything to the Guy
Who's Supposedly In Charge?
Is Anybody Responsible for Anything?
Or is the Government Running Amok, Completely Out of Control, and Unaccountable?
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Our Perfidious Press
For a cogent account of how our perfidious press encourages witnesses to lie or to refuse to testify at all and thus distorts reality, see this report.
If I recall correctly Mark Twain said something to the effect that if you don't read the newspapers you will be uninformed and that if you do read them you will be misinformed.
He of course had no idea of how truly dangerous the big media -- the nation's major newspapers and broadcast networks -- would and have become today. The menace that they pose to our society is substantial but offset to some extent by their having forfeited their credibility with their ideologically biased reporting.
The big media's retention of any meaningful portion of the ability to set the nation's agenda that they formerly enjoyed as the public's sole source of information will depend on the extent to which their increasingly skeptical audience continues to diminish as it turns to the multiple sources of news available on the internet. In any event though, the shattering of the elite press's corruptly misused monopoly over news is good news indeed.
If I recall correctly Mark Twain said something to the effect that if you don't read the newspapers you will be uninformed and that if you do read them you will be misinformed.
He of course had no idea of how truly dangerous the big media -- the nation's major newspapers and broadcast networks -- would and have become today. The menace that they pose to our society is substantial but offset to some extent by their having forfeited their credibility with their ideologically biased reporting.
The big media's retention of any meaningful portion of the ability to set the nation's agenda that they formerly enjoyed as the public's sole source of information will depend on the extent to which their increasingly skeptical audience continues to diminish as it turns to the multiple sources of news available on the internet. In any event though, the shattering of the elite press's corruptly misused monopoly over news is good news indeed.
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
They're Back . . . and So Is Clinton Fatigue With the Scandal Prone Couple's Multitude of Evasions, Excuses, and Lies
After having combed through her e-mails with her minions and destroying an unknown number of them, she cherry picked some 55,000 pages to make public and now is reprising the constant Clinton demand:
Trust Me
All but the most lemming-like among us may thank her for the document dump but heed Ronald Reagan's advice:
Trust but Verify
Friday, March 6, 2015
More on Obamacare at the Supreme Court
Advocates urging the Supreme Court to allow the federal bureaucracy to expand health insurance subsidies beyond those authorized by the Obamacare law are desperately resorting to scare tactics -- citing the supposedly horrific financial impact of not doing what they want.
Irrespective of the validity of their dubious claims that a decision against them would have devastating economic effects, such an argument is an improper one. If the law, as enacted by Congress, is flawed, the job of fixing it is one for the Congress. Fixing faulty legislation is not a judicial function. Courts exist to uphold laws, not to make or repair them.
Irrespective of the validity of their dubious claims that a decision against them would have devastating economic effects, such an argument is an improper one. If the law, as enacted by Congress, is flawed, the job of fixing it is one for the Congress. Fixing faulty legislation is not a judicial function. Courts exist to uphold laws, not to make or repair them.
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
High Court Lunacy
At issue in the Obamacare case that today was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court is a very simple question that is far less complex than all the technical rhetoric that was presented to the justices by the oh-so-sophisticated legal geniuses who debated the issues.
The health care law provides for federal subsidies for the costs of insurance purchased through exchanges established by one of America's 50 states. Proponents of the law insist that subsidies also should go to those purchasing coverage through federal exchanges in states that have refused to establish such exchanges.
Thus the core question is whether the court is going to uphold the law as actually written and enacted or as a majority of the justices might be convinced the law would have been written and passed if the Congress had known what it was doing.
The important thing about the outcome is whether, going forward, the nation is going to be subject to the plain meaning of laws as enacted or by decrees of judges speculatively determining what was intended by those writing and enacting our laws. In other words, are we going to be governed by laws actually enacted or by fiats issued by judges who are neither elected by nor accountable to anyone freely guessing -- in accordance with their own personal, political, and social preferences -- what those enacting the laws might have intended. The latter outcome would invite and encourage ever more and greater legislative irresponsibility and put the nation well down a very slippery slope to judicial tyranny.
The health care law provides for federal subsidies for the costs of insurance purchased through exchanges established by one of America's 50 states. Proponents of the law insist that subsidies also should go to those purchasing coverage through federal exchanges in states that have refused to establish such exchanges.
Thus the core question is whether the court is going to uphold the law as actually written and enacted or as a majority of the justices might be convinced the law would have been written and passed if the Congress had known what it was doing.
The important thing about the outcome is whether, going forward, the nation is going to be subject to the plain meaning of laws as enacted or by decrees of judges speculatively determining what was intended by those writing and enacting our laws. In other words, are we going to be governed by laws actually enacted or by fiats issued by judges who are neither elected by nor accountable to anyone freely guessing -- in accordance with their own personal, political, and social preferences -- what those enacting the laws might have intended. The latter outcome would invite and encourage ever more and greater legislative irresponsibility and put the nation well down a very slippery slope to judicial tyranny.
Uncanny Prediction
In a state of tranquility, wealth, and luxury, our descendants will forget the Art of War, and the noble zeal which made their ancestors invincible.
Every corruption will be employed to loosen the bond of Union which renders our resistance formidable. When the Spirit of Liberty, which now animates our hearts and gives success to our arms, is extinct, our numbers will
accelerate our ruin and render us easy victims to tyranny.
Every corruption will be employed to loosen the bond of Union which renders our resistance formidable. When the Spirit of Liberty, which now animates our hearts and gives success to our arms, is extinct, our numbers will
accelerate our ruin and render us easy victims to tyranny.
. . . Samuel Adams
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