Coming Soon: Gun Week

Coming soon, we’ll be presenting “Gun Week” here at the PachydermsBlog.  It’ll be a week dedicated to our favorite 2nd-Amendment protected activities like target shooting, hunting, and collecting.  If you have any particular issue you’d like us to cover, let me know, either by replying here or at Facebook.

Until then…  keep frosty.

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Golfing With Obama

Well, I’ve been on vacation, anyway.  Back soon.

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Who Is Brett Kimberlin?

Convicted Speedway Bomber turned Liberal Activist Brett Kimberlin is bullying conservatives who point out that he’s a convicted bomber who’s receiving a lot of money from liberals.  After bombing a few choice locations in Speedway, Indiana and coming up with a few more bizarre plots, he received over 50 years in prison for a string of bombings, but for some reason was granted parole after 17 years, and is now breathing free air, collecting cash from liberal stalwarts like Barbara Streissand and Teresa Heinz-Kerry, and is thuggishly trying to silence anyone who points out exactly who he is, trying to falsely frame some for crimes, forcing some to leave their homes in fear of their safety, and threatening others with lawsuits that point out things that are part of the public record.  He’s gotten Wikipedia to delete his own article, hiding his crimes from history.

There are 3 questions I have:

1.  Why is this convicted felon who shouldn’t be free until, at minimum, 2028, breathing free air?

2.  Why are big-name liberals giving him big money?

3.  Why is this serial litigator still allowed to sue?

Today is Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day.  Join me and bloggers around the country in exposing this convicted felon and left-wing activist.

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Liberalism as a Dumb, Hypocritical, Sex-Based Religion

Recently, a friend of mine pointed out this chick:

For those of you who’ve been paying attention for a while, you can guess what the liberal response was.  Here’s a few choice quotes:

Hey, you really seem like one stupid c*nt. That being said, I’d still let you wrap yours lips around my c*ck.”

“This b*tch is Psycho!”

“A hate mongering bigot, she probably supports modern day slavery as well.”

“The Palin legacy, people…..*sigh*”

“She’s bats*it crazy!!”

Yep.  That’s liberals at their best for you!  There’s nothing that says “classy” like Internet-published rape fantasies about a 16-year-old girl who has opinions that you don’t agree with.  That puts her square into, at the very least, stage 2 of the stages of conservative female abuse.  She’s in good company.

I know what you’re saying…   “Mr. Elephant,” because that’s my name, “you called liberalism dumb!  And a religion!  You can’t do that!  It’s just a political philosophy that’s different from yours!  Aren’t you giving in to the same hate you’re criticizing those responders in that video for?”

Silly person.  Let me educate you.  And before we get started – no, I’m not giving in to the hate.  While I despise the philosophy of liberalism, I’m not (and I don’t know a single conservative who is) sexualizing and demonizing a 16-year-old girl who disagrees with me…  because I am an adult and choose to act like it.  I also stand by what I say: Liberalism is a dumb religion.

1. Liberalism is a religion.  That’s why whenever anyone starts quoting from the Bible as the basis for their beliefs, they tend to go ballistic.  Simply put: a Biblical worldview stands in direct contrast to a modern American liberal/socialist worldview.  Their belief in the state as the supreme deity stands in contrast to Christ’s claim that HE was the way, the truth, and the life.  Ann Coulter spent an entire, excellent book pointing out exactly how liberalism is, in fact, a secularist state-based religion, and while I disagree with her conclusions regarding Darwinism (don’t get me started on that stupid debate), her conclusions regarding the cult-like devotion to liberalism by liberals is spot-on.
2. 

   A Complete and Utter Retard.

   Liberals are dumb.  I hate to put it that simply, but when you have a group of people who think you can tax a nation into success and that penalizing success is a good idea (instead of recognizing that success breeds more success) and that catering to the lowest common denominator is a bad idea, then you have to conclude that those who believe this are dumb.  Are you asking me if I actually believe that Karl Marx and all of his derivative socioeconomic systems were dumb?  Yes.  Yes, I do.  Every single last aspect of them.

   “But Mr. Elephant,” you cry like an infant, “what about when someone’s poor, out of work, and lying at home in bed because they got hit by a truck full of the Ebola virus?  Doesn’t the fact that the government can step in and help those poor souls prove that you’re wrong?”

   No, it does not.  No reasonable person would disagree that there is a great benefit to a small group of needy people being assisted in a way that allows them to reach for the maximum amount of their contribution to society, say by assisting them when they are out of work, providing for their medical needs when they are in desperate circumstances, providing them with food, shelter, and the basic needs.  However, where we disagree is in both the source of that assistance and in the quantity of that assistance.  A smart person recognizes that whether the assistance comes from the state or private charity, that ultimately, the source of that assistance (besides God) are human beings who pay for that assistance.  Welfare does not allow you to create assistance out of thin air – the money has to come from somewhere.  A smart person also recognizes that if you give a mouse a cookie, they’re going to want a lifetime of comfortable living on the public dole, with steak and lobster dinners, a nice house, digital cable TV, top-notch medical care, 4 cell phones with unlimited texting, and a partridge in a pear tree.

   A dumb person thinks that the money just appears out of the unlimited government coffers and that helping people forever who don’t contribute to society is a sustainable model.  They scream that, sure, while socialism failed in the USSR, the Eastern Bloc, and Africa, and where it hasn’t failed it keeps people in abject poverty, that it’s just because we haven’t tried the perfect system yet.  If we would just try TROOOOOOO Marxism, Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, etc., it would work perfectly!  They’re ignorant of the fact that as long as there are people (who are by nature territorial, greedy, and in need of boundaries), socialism is doomed to failure.

3. Liberals are hypocrites.  Liberals hold others to standards that they are unwilling to hold themselves to.  They scream about the separation of church and state, and then treat Obama like a messianic figure when he goes into or sends others into black churches to raise money for their campaigns.  They whine about how voting against gay marriage is based in hate and ignorance – and then ignorantly spew their hate on 16-year-old girls who can’t vote and whose personal politics offend them.  They cry about how women should be able to have taxpayer-funded abortion on demand, but work to block the executions of admitted, tried, and convicted cop-killers because killing is wrong.
4. 

   The Traditional Family Terrifies Liberals

   Let’s talk about sex.  There is no issue that liberals think is more important in the world than the right to government-funded consequence-free sex, to the point where it’s the cornerstone of their religion.  That’s why they parade idiots like Sandra Fluke (30-year-old activists masquerading as 23-year-old college coeds) around to try to get the government to force Catholic institutions to distribute free birth control against the Catholic faith, because they see their own religion’s cornerstone as being far more important than that of thousands of years of Catholic traditions.  Liberals believe that any and all sex should be free of any kind of government interference, unless it’s interfering with the rights of fathers.  To liberals, moms possess a magical device called a “vagina” that magically tells them when it’s OK to murder their unborn infants.  If dad wants to raise the child, it doesn’t matter, because he lacks the magical vaginal ability to determine if a child should be murdered due to its giving mommy stretch marks.  But if mommy wants to bring the child to term, that’s her business (unless she’s Sarah Palin), and the government will be there to lessen the consequence of that decision by ensuring that dad, who had no say in whether the child should be carried to term or not, is forced to give up half his salary so that mom can live more comfortably, and if that means weekends in jail for dad when he can’t afford his payments, well, he should’ve thought about that!

   The irony of this being that if liberals weren’t so dead-set opposed to the traditional family, there would already be a method in place to ensure that sex between 2 consenting adults is an enjoyable process, that there’d be a mom and a dad available to rear their child, and both parents would actively contribute to the family’s needs.

As I said in the title, Liberalism is a dumb, hypocritical, sex-based religion.  And if you disagree with me, I won’t say you’re worse than Hitler…   you’re just wrong.

Now, am I saying that liberals can’t have an occasional smart moment, or that all conservatives are always smart all the time?  No.  I am not talking about incidents – I am talking about consistent patterns of behavior that demonstrate, conclusively, that liberals are members of a dumb, hypocritical sex cult.  Which is perfect, because whenever I think of liberals, I keep thinking “screw you”.

So it all works out.

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Piñata II: The Spawning

There’s nothing like watching a Union thug beat a Nikki Haley piñata to make you ask a simple question: why is it OK?  Or, to be a bit more direct: would it be OK if someone made a Barack Obama piñata and beat it with a stick?

I’m not saying that the right has been innocent in their treatment of liberals, but…   well, we are.  Seriously.  There’s no comparison.  Between the union thugs assaulting people who disagree with them to the Occupiers who attack cops and destroy private property, the left seems to have trouble containing the most violent of their ranks.

In comparison, the Tea Party events were peaceful, well-organized, and cooperative with law enforcement.  I’ve been able to come across a couple of stories of TPers getting arrested (most notably when a group decided to Occupy the Hart Office Building in Washington DC), but most of the events have been peaceful.  Sure, there’ve been accusations of people spitting on Congressmen and calling them names, and one CNN producer totally heard a Tea Partier use the F-word once, maybe, possibly….    but in comparison to the Occupy Twits?  They’re freakin’ boy scouts.

The point being that equivocation only serves its purpose when there’s something to equivocate, and there’s nothing here to equivocate.  I’ll go ahead and say it: the AFL/CIO idiot who made a Nikki Haley piñata was just as wrong as someone who’d make a Barack Obama piñata.  They’re both idiots and should both be treated accordingly.

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Young Minds Full of Mush: Our Corrupt Education System

Very few things get my ire up more than our educational system here in the United States.  “Oh, but Mr. Elephant”, you say, actually believing my first name is “Annoyed”, “teachers are wooooooonderful….  and don’t you know that I believe the children are our future…?”

Silly person.  Sit down and let Mr. Elephant educate you, and by “educate” in that sentence, I mean something completely different from the “education” your children are getting today.

First, let me get this much out of the way: I think the public education system is unconstitutional.  I believe our students would be better off if we had a system of privately-held schools that had a profit motivation for producing high quantities of high-quality students.  I also think they would do so at a much lower cost than we currently blow on our unbelievably mediocre national school system – over $1.1 Trillion dollars annually on all levels of education from all levels of government – compare that to our Defense Budget of $707 Billion.  And yet, here, I am not going to advocate for the dismantling of the system.  No, I’m just going to point out what’s wrong with our current system and what we could to fix it.

1. 

   Seems legit.

   Pedophiles.  Whenever I say that word, I’ll bet you that you start thinking “priests” or “boy scout leaders” or “creepy guy hiding in a white van labeled ‘free candy’”, right?  I mean, obviously, the problem of child sexual predators is surely restricted only to those weird and creepy people who do stuff like “pray”, “build fires”, and “drive around in a van advertising free candy”.

   OK, I’ll give you the last one.

   An organization called “Bishop Accountability” once estimated that 10% of priests were pedophiles.  The problem is that they used a very loose interpretation of “pedophile” that included priests who were merely accused of sexual abuse.  The real number is probably between 2 and 5 percent.  Still a high number, but it’s pretty much equivalent to the rate of the general population.  Still – 64% of people, when you say “Catholic Priest” wonder exactly how many children they’ve diddled.

   If they’re looking for diddlers, tho, maybe they should look at teachers.  There are no hard facts because, shock of shocks, powerful lobbies like the National Education Association have worked to keep government polls from being done.  Fortunately, private polling has been done.  It is estimated that the percentage of abuser teachers is similar to the general population (between 1 and 5%), but the problem is that while the average abuser is exposed to children for only a brief time, teachers are exposed to children on a daily basis for many hours a day.  The result is that between 10 and 15% of students have reported being sexually harassed or abused by their teachers. When the American Association of University Women Foundation interviewed over 1,600 students between 8th and 11th grade, they found that 25% of girls and 10% of boys had been abused or harassed, and identified their abuser or harasser as a school employee.  The same poll found that between 1991 and 2000, over 250,000 students had been sexually abused or harassed by a school employee.

   The response from the schools?  15% were terminated.  38.7% resigned, changed districts, or retired.  54.3% suffered no ill effects other than a stern talking-to or re-education.  While it’s certainly terrible that sexual abuse happens, it’s even more terrible when over 54% of cases are covered up, ignored, or punished with little more than a slap on the wrist.  In New York City, teachers accused of sexual abuse of students are put through the district’s disciplinary system, aka “the rubber room”.  Basically, they’re sent to a room to twiddle their thumbs, get paid their full salaries with benefits, and wait – often for years – until the district decides what to do with them.

   How bad is it in NYC?  Well, we have the case of this lovely man, one Roland Pierre.  He finally retired last year at the age of 76.  He’d spent every day since 1997 in one of the rubber rooms, twiddling his thumbs and collecting his full salary and benefits.  Why was he in the rubber room, you may ask?  Did he give a rich kid a bad grade?  Did he vote Republican?  Nothing that heinous, apparently.  All he did was call one of his 6th grader ESL students into his classroom, hugged her, kissed her full on the mouth (with tongue), grabbed her boobs, and finally reached under her skirt for a good feel of her downstairs parts.  He was arrested and then the school system parked him in a room and paid him $97,000 a year, with full vacation and benefits from the age of 62 (when he could’ve retired) to the age of 76.

   And then there’s Alan Rosenfield.  This man has a $10 million real estate portfolio and has been deemed a walking danger to children when he perved out, made some lewd comments to 8th graders, and grabbed some girls’ butts.  So the NYC schools pulled him out of the classroom and put him in a rubber room, paying him $100,049 a year with benefits (including a currently-estimated $87k annual pension) for the past decade.  Again, he could’ve retired at 62, but decided he’d rather, in his own words, give a big F-U to the school system for denying him his rights to grab 13-year-olds’ hinnies.

   And then there’s Francisco Olivares.  This genius among men impregnated a 16-year-old back in 1978, but avoided any fooferall by marrying her.  Over the next 14 years, he molested and took porno pictures of at least 3 more 12-year-old girls.  The school system…  overturned his conviction on a technicality and later, in 2002, he found himself in trouble again when he fondled yet another girl.  This time, the schools struck back hard and the arbitrator gave him a warning not to stand close to students.  And then the stuck him in the rubber room and paid him $94,154 a year, plus benefits.

   The NYC Schools response, once these controversies were exposed?  They shut down the rubber rooms, sent the teachers home, and paid them their salaries and benefits anyway.

   It’s like the thin blue line, except with chalk.

2. Performance.  There’s a very helpful infographic that will pretty much sum up my problems here.  Non-collegiate American education spends more money, per student, than any major country on the planet, and yet, our students consistently come in average to below average in comparison to the rest of the planet. Obviously, dollars are not helping matters, as nations who spend less money per student get consistently better performance from those students (Canada, Finland, South Korea, etc.).  And yet, at the state and local level, we consistently hear how our schools need more money, more money, more money.  I’m fully convinced that if you offered them every last dime, there still wouldn’t be enough money to spend on making students more and more mediocre.
3. Indoctrination.  Teacher in Rowan County, NC tells her students that it’s illegal to criticize Barack Obama.  Another NC teacher, Diantha Harris, used her classroom to bully a student who supported John McCain.  And lest we forget: Barack Hussein Obama…  mmm… mmm… mmm…A simple question: would this be allowed for George W. Bush?  How about Mitt Romney?  Ronald Reagan?  I’ll go ahead and tell you: hell, no.  Private organizations, like clubs and churches, may voice support for those men, but never, ever would a public school be allowed to be used for such caterwauling praise of a sitting President.  At least, not a Republican President.  And why is that, do you suppose?
4. Student discipline.  There’s a reason people’ve been complaining for years about how schools aren’t paddling students anymore: paddling works.  There’s nothing that’ll cure a desire to bring an AK-47 to the classroom like the thought that you’re going to get your butt whooped by a principal with a 2×4 and the upper arm strength of a major league home run king.  You don’t need to be abusive, but with classroom behavior downtrending like a flushed turd, a logical person would have to somehow conclude that maybe, just maybe, a limpwristed approach to discipline isn’t an effective means of discipline.  Joe Clark took up a baseball bat and chained the doors to his school and got rid of most of the discipline problems at his school.Of course, there’s more than just political indoctrination.  There’s religious indoctrination, too.  If you’re opposed to teachers pushing the religion of Christianity on students, then certainly pushing Islam, Buddhism, and Atheism is equally wrong, right?  RIGHT?

Those are just 4 areas.  There’s more, but let’s just run with those 4 for right now because my solution, frankly, will solve the other problems, too.  And like I said above, I’m not going to advocate for dismantling the schools, even though I think it would probably solve these problems much, much more quickly.

The Solution

1. End teacher unions.  There is no reason in the modern world for a teacher union to exist except to bully the taxpayers and protect a class of citizens that need no protection.
2. End tenure.  There is no reason in the world to allow bad teachers to have extra protection in their jobs.  Good teachers will keep their jobs by being good teachers.
3. Keep testing students.  Like it or not, standardized testing is good.  It lets us know if your students meet the standards.  Yes, there are issues, but at least we have a number we can use to base whether your students are failing to meet, meeting, or exceeding expectations.
4. Pay teachers accordingly.  If your students are expected to be at level 7 and they’re consistently testing at level 9, you should be paid more.  If, however, they’re testing at level 4, you should be fired.
5. Hold all school staff accountable.  Do regular background checks and drug testing of all school staff, from the janitors to the principals.  Hold them accountable if they step out of line.
6. Ban political activity by teachers and hold them to the ban.  Teachers who push a political agenda should be fired immediately.
7. Revoke licenses regularly.  If a teacher crosses the line often or egregiously enough, revoke their license permanently.
8. Fire limp-wristed disciplinarians.  Children need to learn to act like adults and they can’t learn from adults whose solution to discipline problems is to hide in the corner, smile through their teeth, and hippie-hug people into submission.  If you have a child who’s a problem, they’re keeping other children from learning.  Send the child home with a note that says they’re not to come back until they grow up and if the parent doesn’t like it, they can pay for a private education or homeschool their little angel.
9. Give parents an out.  If the school their kids attend sucks, then parents need to have an out, via school vouchers and charter schools.  At the very least, if those kids end up in charter schools, then you’ll get lower classroom sizes at the schools they leave.
10. Keep school boards accountable.  In North Carolina, I’m in favor of removing school taxes from city and county budgets and placing that taxation authority in the hands of the school system – but only giving them taxation authority over families whose students use the school system.  On one hand, if I have no children, then I am receiving a very limited benefit from the school system.  On the other hand, it means that the people who receive the greatest benefit from a public education will have to hold those elected officials responsible for the expenditure of their local tax dollars.  In other states, I dunno.  Just vote the punks out.

Do you have any ideas to make our schools better?  Comment below, man!

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It’s a Battleground State, oh Lord.

Admittedly, I live in North Carolina and by all the political pundits, it is considered a Battleground state.  So where are the cannons and the soldiers?  Well the cannons are political ads and the shots have been fired.  Its Obama vs Romney and its only started and it’s already getting out of hand.  It’s not enough that we are getting bashed out of hand that we overwhelmingly voted in an Amendment stating that marriage is only between a male and a female, one day before Obama: I am for it, I am against it, and I am for it stance came out.  So North Carolina exercising our constitutional rights to vote makes Obama do something?  Why my gosh, I do declare, little oh NC makes Obama take a stand, what is the world coming to?  And the Obama camp has the audacity to run political ads here?

I do have to admit  it, that the Obama camp has some nice ads.  The latest one is all about how Obama has saved the Auto Industry, Single Handily took out Osama Bin Laden,  Inherited a terrible economy that he has no responsibility while creating 4 million new jobs at the same time.  If I didn’t know Obama and how he is a failure as a president, I would be out there waving American Flags and say lets move forward, yeah!   Give me a break.  It’s not that his ads aren’t great, they are a big pile of crap stinking up the place and we have to watch them.

Now the Pac that is running the Romney ads aren’t much better.   They state that Obama while dissing Wal-Street is taking money from Wal-Street.  While technically its true, the Wal-Street bailout didn’t happen until 2009. Obama was elected in 2008.  His contributors and his stint in the Senate didn’t affect the Bailout, while his policies as President did.  So it’s a bit misleading but I guess all Political ads are like that.

What I don’t understand is has everyone forgotten the Economy.  Like Clinton said, It’s the Economy Stupid!  Obama has made the deficit worse than all other Presidents combined in History, supported two failed stimulus plans, has real unemployment close to 19% (using old standards) and gas prices has jumped up to close to $4.00 a gallon nationwide while all of his green initiatives failed.   I almost wish we had Jimmy Carter back and for me that is saying alot.

And it bewilders me why some people think He is the best thing since sliced bread.   All of my governmental friends love him because he is doling out money to fund federal grants and sending people back to school for free all on the taxpayer dime.  While its true that some grants are beneficial and education is a wonderful thing, it’s just another example of tax payer waste while the Economy is not getting any better. The housing market is still in the dumps, food and energy prices are increasing, and inflation is slowly creeping up.

I admit it I am not a Romney fan, but he has a good head on his shoulders.  He is a business executive with a modicum of success.  Is he a conservative? No he is not, but neither is he a socialist and that has to be a good thing.  Instead of being Obama blaming everyone else for his problems, at least Romney has admitted he has made some mistakes in the past, namely Romney Care and Pro-Choice in the past.  Ask yourself has Obama ever admitted to making a mistake?  Well?  Has He? Oh yea..Gay Marriage.  Technically not a mistake as he was “evolving on the issue”.  So the answer is No.

So being in a battleground state, I guess our votes count.  Technically speaking, all of our large cities: Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro areas are Liberal.  Every other county that is considered Rural are Conservative.   It is my hope that the same 61% that turn out for Amendment One turn out for the national election.  While it’s hard to get excited about Romney, ask yourself if is it better to have four more years of the worst president in recent History?

 

 

 

 

 

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Skittles, Iced Tea, and Stupidity

For two months now, all we’ve heard is how an evil white guy in Florida gunned down a poor, innocent black kid in cold blood, and I’m sick of it.

I’ve spoken out on this on Facebook and message boards quite a bit, but it’s time to lay everything out, both in terms of understanding the situation, the law behind it, the people involved, and the fluff on both sides of the argument.  If you don’t agree with me, feel free to start your own blog on the matter.

Here’s the facts that we actually know at this point:

• On February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch guy and concealed weapon license holder that lived in a neighborhood with rising crime rates, saw a person he thought was behaving suspiciously.  He phoned it in to the non-emergency number at the Sanford, FL police department at 7:09 PM.  At around 7:11-7:12, Martin begins running and Zimmerman begins to chase him.  The operator tells him “We don’t need you to do that”.  Zimmerman says “OK” and gives his best address location to the operator.  At 7:13, he hangs up.
• Martin’s girlfriend was on the phone with him around 7:12 and was told that someone was following him.  She reported that there was a verbal confrontation at some point during the phone call.
• At about 7:25, there is a physical altercation during which Zimmerman pulls a Kel-Tec PF9 pistol and fires a single shot at very close range.  The slug hits Martin in the chest.  At 7:26, support personnel arrive and perform lifesaving measures on Martin, who is declared dead at 7:30 PM.  Zimmerman tells the police officer on site that he had shot Martin.
• According to witnesses, there was a physical altercation that involved Martin on top of Zimmerman, hitting him with his fists.  Medical reports released after the event show that Zimmerman had wounds to his face, nose, and back of head, and the back of his jacket was wet and covered with grass, consistent with him lying on his back in the wet grass.  Zimmerman’s hands were not bruised (indicating that he did not hit Martin).  Martin’s autopsy report showed that his hands were bruised, as if he’d been hitting someone.  The autopsy report also showed that Martin had THC (a byproduct of marijuana) in his system at the time of his death, but the quantity as of today is not known.
• Zimmerman was placed into police custody and taken downtown where he was photographed, interviewed, and investigated.  The state attorney’s office called it self-defense and declined to pursue charges against him at the time.
• After protests by the victim’s family and rising national pressure, Florida Governor Rick Scott assigned a different state prosecutor to the case.  On April 11, 2012, the new prosecutor charged Zimmerman with 2nd Degree Murder.

Here’s where we have to start talking about legal specifics.  I am not a lawyer, so please consult a legal professional if you have questions about this:

• Self-defense law in the United States is simple and is accepted nationwide.  If a reasonable person believes they or someone else is at risk of loss of life, serious bodily injury, or serious sexual assault, then they have the right to use deadly force in defense.
• There are two doctrines that are tied to self-defense.  The first is called “duty to retreat” and it states that a defendant who is claiming self defense must prove to the court that they attempted to avoid the conflict and took reasonable steps to attempt to retreat before they used deadly force.  19 states use this doctrine.
• The second doctrine is called “stand your ground”.  This doctrine states that if you are in a conflict that you did not provoke and you have to use deadly force to defend yourself, you are under no duty to retreat.  31 states use some form of this doctrine that varies from an absolute stand-your-ground law (24 states) to a limited version that only applies to home, business, car, etc. (7 states)
• Massad Ayoob nicely covers stand-your-ground laws here.  You should pay attention to what he says.
• Under Florida Law, Second Degree Murder in Florida is defined as “The unlawful killing of a human being, when perpetrated by any act imminently dangerous to another and evincing a depraved mind regardless of human life, although without any premeditated design to effect the death of any particular individual, is murder in the second degree”. (FL State Code 782.04 (2)).  In other words, it is an unlawful killing of a human being with malice, but without premeditation.  A classic description of 2nd Degree Murder is if a person became angry, grabbed his usual self-defense gun, and then shot the person he was angry at.

This is what we know so far.  Unfortunately, there’s so much stupid heat over this tragedy that we’ve forgotten the real facts of this case:

• A young man is dead, possibly because of his own actions.
• Another young man’s life is ruined, possibly because he defended his life against an aggressor.

Such a shame that both of these young men are being dragged through the mud by race-baiters, political hacks, media vultures deliberately editing material to poison public opinion, and politicians running for re-election.

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The Failure of Libertarianism

I get a lot of questions: if you’re such a TROOOOOOOO conservative, why aren’t you a Libertarian?  Don’t you know that Libertarians like RON PAUL!!!!! are the only TROOOOOOOOOOO conservatives?  If the Republicans don’t let RON PAUL!!!!! influence the agenda, then they’re doomed, I tell you!  DOOOOOOOOOOMMMEEEEEDDDDD!!!!

No, You’re Not.

First – let’s address a couple of issues.  I am not a Libertarian…   however, I was once registered as a Libertarian.  Mostly out of irritation of what I was seeing in some local and state politics, I abandoned the GOP for 3 1/2 years in the early 2000′s and I felt that the Libertarian Party would be, in part, a good fit.  Sure, there were elements of disagreement, but at least I had a party home and wasn’t one of those dumb ol’ unaffiliated voters.  And then I found out a few cold, hard facts…  namely that the Libertarian Party was about as stable as a 13-year-old on heroin.  You had the war between the small-l libertarians (who weren’t libertarian enough for the tastes of the rest) and the Big-L Libertarians (who were the troooooooooo guardians of Libertarian thought) – and get along they most certainly did NOT.  It was like a bunch of socialists debate why socialism had never worked trying to convince the other group that it was just because the right brand of socialism had never been tried.  To quote from one of my favorite comedies, it was like watching a bunch of retards trying to hump a doorknob.

Bu the bigger problem with Libertarianism isn’t in the people involved: it’s in the philosophy.  Like I said, I was only a libertarian (small l, I’ll admit it) for so long before I had to admit the follies of the philosophy.  Interestingly, those follies seem eerily similar to follies I assign to socialism.

At this point, the libertarian folks I know are probably shaking their fists at the screen, angrily typing up responses that sound like a mixture of Ayn Rand and the Unabomber Manifesto, mixed with a few RON PAUL!!!! references.  Do yourself a favor: wait until I’m done, m’kay?  Shut up and read for a minute, because then you’ll have a lot more ammunition to prove how wrong I am. Or, maybe you’ll learn something.

• Libertarianism is a great theoretical concept.  In theory, the idea that people should live and let live with a minimum of government involvement, earning their just rewards as the result of their investment, responsibility, and willpower is an attractive theory.
• It doesn’t work.  No libertarian society in history has ever thrived.  Ever.  I mean, I hate to bring up Somalia, but…   well…  Somalia.
• The primary error libertarianism makes is ignoring human nature.  While it’s nice to presume that given freedom, people will rise up and take responsibility and those that don’t will fall and thus survival of the fittest will leave the best standing in the end…   life doesn’t work that way.  This is not a good world we are in.  People are not vending machines that you can stick quarters in and get responsibility out.  The sad fact is that the world is set up in a way that allows people who are successful to abuse those who are not – and those who are successful are not always so because they are better at what they do, more skilled, more responsible, or more knowledgeable.  Sometimes, the cream that rises to the top is spoiled.
• American Libertarianism tends to rely on what it calls a “strict constructionist” interpretation of the Constitution.  The problem is: there is no such thing.  The very phrase should give it away: it’s an INTERPRETATION.  Interpretations vary from person to person because interpretations are individualist.  If I had an identical twin and we were raised exactly the same, had the same education, and had exactly the same job, income, and family life – our interpretations would still be different because we are ultimately individuals.  For Libertarianism in general and the Party in particular, if you don’t toe the line, you’re an outcast.  The amount of groupthink expected of a philosophy that prides itself on individual liberty is ironically staggering.
• It’s important at this point to illustrate why Libertarianism came about.  The philosophy of libertarianism developed in the 20th century out of Objectivism as a reaction against statist socialism.  And while I can admire the stance against statism and socialism, libertarianism is ultimately as extreme of a position as those it opposed.  The problem is that as an opposition to an extreme, Libertarianism is itself an extreme.  Extremes aren’t necessarily bad or good, but they are, for lack of a better term, uncomfortable.  If we’re honest with ourselves, Libertarianism has more in common with anarchist thought than it does with conservative thought.
• And then we have the TROOOOOOOOOOOOOO believers, aka, the Libertarians.  And honestly, one cannot judge Libertarianism fully without considering the effect it has on the philosophy of its followers.  If I believed in a religion that caused a large portion of people to think that blowing up school buses was a good idea, people would question my own and my religion’s sanity – and rightly so.  Having said that, Libertarianism, perhaps more than any other American political philosophy, has a stronger tendency to attract and promote conspiracy theories than any other system.  And I don’t mean fringe stuff like the anti-Federal Reserve ridiculousness…  I mean the black-helicopter-contrails-UFO-Mayan-calendar-the-system-is-going-to-fail-next-week nutballs.  If so many of these folks are attracted to Libertarianism, there must be a reason why.  I’m not saying where there’s smoke, there’s fire….   but there sure is a lot of smoke.

Got it?  OK.  Now, having said all that, I do admire some elements of libertarianism.  I believe that smaller, more efficient government is a good thing.  I think a reduction in taxes will spur economic growth.  I think there are times our attention needs to move away from international matters and towards home.  I think the war on drugs is a waste of dough.  I think that what responsible, adult people do in their own homes with their own naked parts is between them and God.  These are good things with a consistent viewpoint and you should be proud of them, Libertarians.

But…  there are other things that are not good.  Isolationism doesn’t work.  Laws on certain kinds of behavior are there for a reason.  Law enforcement is necessary.  A social safety net to help those in their most desperate hour is a good thing.  Conspiracy theories are usually rejected by the educated community for a reason.

And in case you’re wondering, no, our founding fathers were not Libertarians.  They were a mishmash of political philosophies that worked to build a land based on liberty, not libertarianism.  Get over it.  Even more interestingly, the woman considered to be most responsible for American Libertarianism – Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, aka Ayn Rand – herself rejected Libertarianism for some of the exact same reasons I do.  Probably right before she wrote a 2,000-page screenplay about railroad tycoons.

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Path to the Electoral College: How Romney Could Win

Right now, Larry Sabato has done some excellent analysis (http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/plan-of-attack-obama-romney-and-the-electoral-college/) of the electoral college and believes that, as polls have it, the race today will come down to 7 states: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and New Hampshire.  He’s gone ahead and chalked up North Carolina, Missouri, and Indiana to Romney while awarding Pennsylvania to Obama, giving 247-206 Romney with 87 toss-up points.

This puts Obama in trouble.  These states are places where he won by significant margins in 2008, and the fact that they’re in serious contention shows exactly how weak his numbers are in states he should have no trouble with.  This fact, I believe, leaves Romney with a few paths to the White House, and all of them deal with him focusing on battleground states, along with trying to steal a couple of Obama’s.

First: there’s the simple numbers.  Losing none of his expected hold states, if Obama wins 2 of the big-number states (Ohio, Florida, or Virginia), he’s back in the White House.  Romney MUST win Florida plus one of the other 2 to stay alive – OR he must steal a big-number state from Obama.  And numerically, Florida is the most important jewel in the mix.  Without stealing another state from Obama, Romney losing FL will guarantee Obama 4 more years.

The good news for Romney is that Florida seems to be very winnable for him.  The recession continues to wreck havoc with the economy in that state.  That’s part of why Obama has weighed in on the Trayvon Martin case: if he can rile up his base (and scare off whites) in Florida with charges of racism, then he could take the sunshine state.  To top it off, polls are showing that should Romney nominate Rubio or West to be his Veep, his numbers may actually go down in Florida.  The only Floridian that gave Romney any kind of boost in the polls is the Floridian with the name that a lot of the country still reacts negatively to: Jeb Bush.  On the upside for Romney, unless there’s some overriding issue (Nixon/Ford in 76 and Bush 2’s 08 failures, Clinton’s 96 charm), Florida tends to trend Republican.

Virginia and Ohio have numbers all over the place, but Obama’s recent push for gay marriage seems to be having some negative effect in both states, moreso in Ohio.  The metro areas in Virginia do tend to trend more heavily towards Obama – however, Virginia’s typically a GOP lock, even with squishy candidates like Bob Dole.

Ohio’s a different story.  The last time Ohio didn’t vote for the Presidential winner was 1960, when they chose Nixon over Kennedy.  They tend to be the national bellwether for Presidential elections.  At this point, it’s pretty close.  While the primaries were on, Obama held a solid lead, but post-primaries and post-gay marriage, Obama’s numbers have weakened considerably in The O.  If the urban folks stay home and the farmers come out to vote, it could easily flip in November.

That leaves the lower point states.  Iowa used to trend Republican, but has gone Democrat in every election since 1988, with the exception of 2004.  Most polls have shown Obama ahead, and unless Romney makes a big push for the farmland, I don’t see him nabbing Iowa.

Colorado tends to trend Republican, but went Democrat in 2008 and 1992.  To me, this indicates a state where they’ll go Republican unless they want to make a statement of dissatisfaction about a sitting Republican President.  The only regular polls have been done by PPP, a Democrat outfit, but the most recent poll done by Purple Strategies shows a dead heat.  Colorado Republicans like Romney a lot, but the rest of the state may feel queasy about Mormons (2.8% of Colorado’s population).

Nevada is anything if unpredictable.  One could say that the higher Mormon population in Nevada could help things along for Romney (5.6%).  But let’s be honest: Mormons tend to vote often and vote Republican, so there’s no real reason to expect them to not go ahead and guarantee those votes.  Most polls show Obama having a high-single-digit lead in Nevada, enough for me to go ahead and say it’ll fall blue in ’12.  Then again, they did surprise me in 2010, so I could be wrong, especially when one considers that with the exception of 92, 96, and 08, they have been a consistent GOP state.  At this point, though, I’m still leaning it D.

Finally, New Hampshire.  Honestly, the polls are all over the place and the state’s record for Presidential votes is extremely inconsistent over the past 10 cycles (although mostly Democrat, they went Bush in 2000 and with the exceptions of Obama, Clinton, Kennedy, FDR (3 out of 4 times), and Wilson, they have voted consistently Republican.

So with that all said, if I were to map it out today, I’d say that the race is going to come down to Colorado, Ohio, and New Hampshire. In my scenario, Obama has to win either Ohio or some combination of 2 states.  Romney, however, must win Ohio and one of the other 2 states.

Or…  he could steal a state.

It’s possible.  Romney is from Massachusetts, and…  OK, he won’t win Massachusetts.  However, he has polled stronger than expected in his birth state of Michigan.  Flipping the normally Democratic Michigan (16 EC points) would be difficult, but not impossible (some polls show the gap at 4-5%).  Romney would definitely have to work to get the rural vote out for him and would have to come up with some kind of placating for the auto industry union folks, but it’s not impossible.

Pennsylvania (20 EC points) is possible, too.  While strong union ties show Obama with a high single-digit lead in the state, Pennsylvania has trended heavily Democrat in recent years.  However, a good push by Romney could flip Penn.

Flipping Wisconsin (10 EC points) could happen, too.  The gay-marriage thing has devastated Obama’s lead in the polls from 17 points to 4 points, and a strong performance by Scott Walker in the recall election (especially after the recent announcements about the well-managed budget in that state) could help Romney’s prospects.  Furthermore, the anti-Walker faction seems to be ignorant of exactly how badly their aggression is viewed by the average voter.  If they keep pounding away, it may turn independent voters off (or cause moderate Democrats to stay home).

Oregon (7 EC points) is similar.  High numbers for Obama bombed out after the gay marriage announcement.  His lead is down to 4 points in the most recent poll.

And, lest we forget, Romney could also steal one of the states I’ve given to Obama (Nevada, Iowa).   Flipping both of those means that Ohio is unnecessary for Romney to win the White House (he could do it with New Hampshire 273-265).

So there we have it.  That’s my early analysis.  Obviously, the entire campaign won’t be about Ohio, Colorado, and New Hampshire, but I believe those 3 states will be the deciding factor for 2012.

Wanna prove me wrong?  Go vote.

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