Dohiyi Mir

Racist, Doped Up On Oxy, And Ignorant Of History Is No Way To Go Through Life, Son.

Jesus fuck:

LIMBAUGH: We're not having much luck here, folks. We've been doing exhaustive research in the last four minutes. We're trying to find out who owned and who sold Sheila Jackson Lee and what they got for her. She just said on the floor of the House of Representatives mere moments ago this morning, and she was standing there as a freed slave because this Congress came together. I didn't think they were coming together at all, but she talked about the Congress during Lincoln. But anyway, she's a freed slave. Somebody had to own her, and I -- we don't know who.

This is what Ms Jackson Lee said:

I want to challenge this body to be the kind of Lincolnesque attitude, as yesterday was the official birthday of President Lincoln, February 12. And although it was a tragic time in our history, I can assure you that it showed the greatest promise of America when people could come together and do something great. I stand here as a freed slave because this Congress came together. Are we going to be able to do it today to free America? 

It would be clear to most students of history that she was referring to Congress as an entity (as opposed to the 113th assembly) that at one point came together in the wake of the CIvil War and passed the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery--thanks in some part to Lincoln before he was assassinated.  Then, you know she mused about whether the current legislature might do something as meaningful.  I'm not entirely certain that Limbaugh knows this, but who the fuck cares?  He's objectively just a racist asshole.

ntodd

Both Sides Do It

In the Dem corner, Gabby Giffords, a Congresswoman shot along with other human beings by an armed madmen.  In the GOP corner, Ted Nugent, an armed madman who has threatened to shoot other human beings, including the President of the United States.

And to prove it's just a cock extender for guys like him:

He sounded distressed about his decision to leave his guns at home rather than causing a scene – and likely his arrest – by bringing them into the Capitol.

“I even turned in my knife,” Nugent groused. “I feel like a little girl...”

What a fucking baby.  A sexist, emasculated crybaby.

ntodd

They Seem To Have Forgot That They Are In Rebellion

Burke, August, 1776:

I do not know how to wish success to those whose Victory is to separate from us a large and noble part of our Empire. Still less do I wish success to injustice, oppression and absurdity.

I'm kinda the same way about threats to secede, although I'm specifically torn between perpetual Union and Good Fucking Riddance.

ntodd

PS--Really, you're gonna go to war over the 2nd Amendment, but not, say...the 4th, or the 1st?  Then what good are the fucking guns if they only protect themselves and not the rest of our constitutional rights?

Speaking Of The Fourteenth Amendment (Again)

Politico:

[T]he White House says the 14th Amendment is off the table, casting doubt on the legal merits of the strategy. Press secretary Jay Carney stated in December that “this administration does not believe that the 14th Amendment gives the president the power to ignore the debt ceiling — period.”

If Obama does try to lift the limit on his own, at least one Republican has threatened a constitutional counter of his own: impeachment.

“Maybe we’ll start talking about impeachment on the floor of the House here,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican who believes the debt ceiling is among Republicans’ few remaining fiscal constraints. “Really, President Obama should not try this.”

Go ahead.  Who the fuck cares about impeachment?  Obama will gar-on-teed be acquitted by the Senate.  Ya got nuthin.

Obama invoking the 14th Amendment would amount to “a nuclear bomb,” said Rep. Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican and chairman of the Joint Economic Committee.

“We certainly wouldn’t let it stand,” Brady said, though he didn’t mention impeachment. “This is America’s debt. It is serious business and not something to play a legal and political game with.”

Yeah, it is serious business and not something to play a game with.  So why is your caucus hellbent on doing just that and not letting the Treasury pay back debts created by your appropriations, motherfucker?

But while conservatives argue that invoking the 14th Amendment is unconstitutional, Democrats say that’s up to the Supreme Court.

I'm betting that'll end up being deemed a political question.  C'mon, let's try it and see what happens!

ntodd

Dear South Carolina: You Fucking Lost

In honor of SC's secession:

[A] bloc of Southern states that once were essential to any Democratic majority—from Wilson to Clinton, from the onset of World War I to the defeat of Al Gore in 2000—is no longer. Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina: The Democrats now can lose every one of these states in a presidential race and still win handily. Obama just did. The “Southern strategy” is gone.

Both parties’ wooing of the Deep South proved enormously beneficial to many states, such as Alabama, that began to split away from the Democrats in the 1970s and today are wholly alienated from the Democratic Party. Alabamans receive $2 in federal spending for every $1 they pay in taxes; this dramatic imbalance is an artifact of a dysfunctional U.S. Electoral College that encouraged the leaders of both major parties to court Southern states.

With the South now politically unhinged from the process of deciding the presidential election, calls for secession are the first evidence of the new panic on the Right. Facing the specter of more liberal Supreme Court justices and a political logic that will slowly extinguish political incentives to deliver federal aid to the Southern states, extremists in the region have resurrected a 19th century strategy. Playing the only political card they have left, they are threatening to exit the nation.

It's interesting that the calls for secesh today come after a free and fair presidential election based on the Constitution they claim to respect.  And in SC's declaration, they refer to Jefferson's, but fail to note that we rebelled against a government in which the colonies had no representation, in direct contrast to SC's electoral votes, Representatives in the House and equal suffrage in the Senate, not to mention their own functioning republican government provided for under the Constitution.

Even funnier is they complained about nullification (which they themselves tried in the 1820s) by states like Vermont:

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them.

Buncha a whiny fuckers, never seem to get the hint.

ntodd

And Fuck Love, Christmas

Mary Elizabeth Williams hates Love, Actually.  Whatthefuckever.  We love it.  Including this storyline:

I'm on Shag Highway, heading west!

ntodd

FB Memes Don't Kill People, People Who Post FB Memes Do

25 States allow anyone to buy a gun, strap it on, and walk down the street with no permit of any kind: some say it's crazy. However, 4 out of 5 US murders are committed in the other half of the country: so who is crazy?

 - Andrew Ford 

I have no fucking clue who Andrew Ford is, and a google search only offers more questions.  I don't care: I read the quotation on a FB meme, so it must be true.

Saw this one today:

How did "A well regulated Militia" get twisted to mean "A well-armed, unregulated populace"?

I can only presume somebody read the late, great Molly Ivins at some point and boiled her prose down to a glib bumper sticker.

Anyway, I hate these goddamned things.  They take important issues and make them sound so pat, like there's no reason at all for people to have different perspectives, different goals, and different means to their ends.  And often, they're just fucking objectively wrong.

In this f'rinstance given the data, I'm not entirely convinced that Ford, whoever the hell he is, comes close to the truth.

Now let's take a liberal's favorite mandate (to show that there's precedent for Obamacare's insurance mandate), the Second Militia Act of 1792:

That every citizen, so enrolled [in the Militia[ and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of powder and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and powder-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a pound of powder; and shall appear so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack.

Certainly it was for regulating a militia, but notice the legislation didn't say to keep arms stockpiled somewhere.  They were to be kept by individuals, who were compelled to purchase the minimum necessary equipment.

Indeed, the militia was to be "composed of the body of the people" as some state constitutions said at the time.  That hardly negates, but rather reinforces, the notion that individuals were expected to bear arms.  Per the English Bill of Rights, which clearly influenced our Framers, that was in part due to a protected right that people were expected to exercise.  And do not forget the more explicit language contained in the contemporaneous state constitutions of Vermont, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, not to mention Madison's original wording (before it was mangled by Congressional committee) in his proposed Bill of Rights:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed...

But let's step beyond the Second Amendment for a moment.  While no clauses in the Constitution can be presumed to have no intended effect, they neither can be considered outside the context of the whole document and its genesis.

If major cases that establish things like the right to privacy rest to some degree on penumbral emanations, one would think that individual rights to bear arms would be as well.  For instance, Griswold:

[S]pecific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. See Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 516-522 (dissenting opinion). Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment, in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers "in any house" in time of peace without the consent of the owner, is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." The Fifth Amendment, in its Self-Incrimination Clause, enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Wouldn't the fact that the BoR is fundamentally an enumeration of individual rights lead one to conclude that the right to bear arms isn't merely a collective one?  Or does the First Amendment only guarantee the right of MANY people to assemble, or the Fourth Amendment only guarantee that communes be secure?  If I have a right to be free from forced quartering of the soldiery, do I not have a right to defend my home from such tyrannical acts with arms?  And has the Ninth Amendment no say in the matter?

No, it's pretty clear that the issue is settled when you honestly examine the Constitution as a whole, as well as the original environment from whence it came.  And, of course, more recently with rulings from the Supreme Court.

Now the question remains as to where the reasonable bounds of this individual right actually lie since rights inevitably come into conflict with others.  When you consider the First Amendment, most people acknowledge there are limits: you can't yell "Theatre!" in a crowded fire; one must not slander/libel another; we can establish buffer zones around Planned Parenthood so people can exericse their other constitutional rights to self-determination.  

Even Tony Scalia accepts limits to the Second.  In Heller:

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose...Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.^{26 [Footnote: We identify these presumptively lawful regulatory measures only as examples; our list does not purport to be exhaustive.]}

We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.” 307 U. S., at 179. We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of “dangerous and unusual weapons.”...

It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks. But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.

Not all aspects of this right have been explored in the courts just yet.  But I think it's undeniable that the individual right is a done deal, and incorporated against the states as well, so let's leave that battle now.  How far does that right go?

I'm fairly certain it's not so limited that Michelle Obama's secret plan to seize all weapons once she secures an unconstitutional third term in 2024 will work.  I'm also fairly certain that we can't just go purchase nukes from Iran and keep them in our garden shed.  I guess the answer is somewhere in between those extremes, and in between whatever bullshit is found in Facebook memes.

ntodd

The World Speaks To Us Like A Great Book

Jesus, it's been a surreal couple of days wherein I feel like Brother William...

ntodd

And For Fuck's Sake, Get A Grip, Losers

Democracy didn't die when Walker survived his recall in WI, and the US didn't die because millions of Americans expressed their preferences in 2012 (or 1860, for that matter).  Really, our children have a better sense of perspective than these whiners...

ntodd

Seriously, Fuck Anybody Who Votes For Rmoney/Ryan/Rand

Jesus fucking Christ stomping on the poor and unwashed:

Top Romney Adviser: If You Own A Microwave, You Aren’t Really Poor

Really, Romney wants us all to live in Dickens' world:

The homes of the poor were equipped with open fireplaces for heat and cooking but not with ovens. Thus many, like the Cratchits, took their Christmas goose or turkey to the baker's shop. Bakers were forbidden to open on Sundays and holidays but would open their shops on these days to the poor and bake their dinners for a small fee. Dickens tells of Master Peter Cratchit and the two younger Cratchits going to fetch their Christmas goose from the bakers.

Sorry, POORS, if you can spring for 50 bucks after scrimping to buy a micro at Wal-Our-Employees-Are-So-Underpaid-They-Cost-The-Rich-38-Bucks-Annually-In-Food-Stamps-Mart, or even 10 bucks off CraigsList, you aren't poor.  Because only the Rich can actually warm up the food they get at the Dollar Store or Food Pantry.

This is what you vote for if you cast a ballot for Romney.  This myth, and the denial of the right of women to make their own medical decisions because of the myth some MEN believe in about God and lady parts and rape.  This myth and the one about Obama cutting Medicare.  This myth and voodoo economics.  It's all a myth.

Fuck you and your cognitive dissonance.

ntodd