A Few Thoughts On the Ruling…

1. Obamacare sucks in every possible way.
2. The ruling had a somewhat subtle, but firm slap in the face of Congress, declaring that their use of the Commerce Clause was incorrect and that the authority for the act rested under the Taxation Powers of Congress.
3. In joining with the left, John Roberts may have just handed the November election to the GOP.  Now the GOP has more to run on that “we’re not Obama”.  They’ve got the economy and they’ve got Obamacare.  It won’t be hard for them to point out that the costs of Obamacare will be borne by the taxpayers in the middle of a bad economy – a formula that got them a tremendous victory in the House last November.  The more I think about it, this whole scenario has a very Karl-Rovesque feel to it, with someone playing a much smarter game than anyone’s realizing.
4. The ruling makes Democrats happy today.  I liken it to a team who just got a touchdown in a football game.  They did, however, miss the extra point and now the other team (the GOP) has excellent field position.  The only question is: can our Bringham-Young-graduate QB take it to the paint?

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Stupid, Stupid, Stupid…

So the court says Obamacare is a-OK.  That’s right: the right of the government to force you to spend your money how they see fit is covered under “taxation authority”.  And, as expected, there’s a lot of blame to be passed around, most of it resting on the back of Chief Justice John Roberts.

But I don’t blame Roberts.  Honestly, looking at the ruling, I see the direction he was heading in: Congress has the power to tax you, and forcing you to buy health insurance is no different.  It’s not an argument I agree with 100%, but it’s a logical one.  It also throws the role of healthcare back into the legislature.  No, I don’t blame Roberts or even the left side of the court.

I blame you.

That’s right, America – I blame you.  You’re the one who elected these idiots.  You’re the one who voted for “hope” and “change” instead of thinking things through.  You’re the ones who voted retards into Congress assuring us that they were nowhere near as socialist and liberal as we said they were.  You, and only you, are the ones that I hold responsible for wiping your ass with our constitution, our economy, and our future and flushing it down the toilet.  You were stupid.

You don’t like that, do you?  You don’t like me calling you a bunch of retards?  Well, then, you shouldn’t have voted for retards.

Want to change my mind about you?  Then freaking vote right this time.  Stop sticking your fingers in your ears when someone tells you that Obama and his radical left are lying to you.  Stop feeling bad about your own racism, thinking you can cure it by voting for a black guy who hangs out with domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers.  Stop not thinking things through.

And you Republicans?  Don’t you DARE back down on this.  Take hold of the reins that the people are screaming at you to take hold of and show us some leadership.  Defund this piece of garbage and send it back to hell where it belongs.  Be conservative, not stupid.

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Gun Week: Gun Laws – A Few Basic Facts

First – I updated yesterday’s post because I forgot one big point about why you should own a gun: hunting.

Now, on to guns!  Or more accurately: gun laws.

If there’s anything that the Trayvon Marin case has taught us, it’s that the average citizen – and occasionally, gun owner – knows about as much about gun laws as they do about quantum physics.  On the one hand, you have puppet masters and their marionettes screaming about the evils of “stand your ground” laws.

I’ve already covered the Trayvon case before, but there are some things that bear repeating.  For instance, everything Massad Ayoob says here:

Again, as The Great Ayoob says in the above video, you have a right to defend yourself with deadly force in the United States.  No state in the union can take that right away from you.  They can, however, restrict that right using laws like the “duty to retreat” and “concealed carry”.  We’ll talk about reasonable restrictions tomorrow, but for today, let’s reiterate some basic points.

First, let’s talk basic self defense.  Again, you have the right to defend your life and the lives of those around you if you, as a reasonable person, believe that you are presented with a real and present danger to your life, serious bodily injury, or serious sexual assault.  If a bad guy is coming after you with a knife, you have the right to pull a gun to defend yourself.

Where you live, however, defines how you can use that gun.  A few states require you to at least attempt to retreat, even in your own home (“officer, he was coming to kill me and I tried to get away, but couldn’t”).  Other states have a castle doctrine or stand-your-ground law that removes this duty to retreat, so long as you are in your home or, depending on the state, in your car or your place of business.  Other states have a variety of the stand-your-ground law, where you have no duty to retreat at any time in any situation, and you have a near-absolute right to defend your life without retreating an inch.

As I’ve said before, I am not a lawyer.  You should consult your state’s laws if you have any questions.

Posted Here for Totally Non-Gratuitous Reasons

Second, let’s talk about carrying your gun.  Again, this depends on where you live (hence why you should call on your Senators to back the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act, which will protect your rights to carry your weapons if you cross state lines into any state that allows you to carry your weapons (Illinois and DC being the only notable anti-freedom locales in the US).  The House has already passed the bill, and now it’s in the hands of Harry Reid’s Senate.

God help us all.

It’s important to know how you can carry your gun.  Most states have some sort of concealed carry license that requires you to receive some level of training and maybe do a background check so that you can carry your gun in a way that it can’t be easily seen by the public – and that shares that rights to some degree with other states.  Some states allow you to carry your gun on your hip in full view of the public.  Some of those states have restrictions on open carry that are, well….  Interesting.  North Carolina, for instance, protects the right to open carry in the state constitution, but the right is whittled down by a restriction that doesn’t allow you to cause terror to the public.  In other words, you have a constitutional right to carry your sidearm in a holster in full public view…  right up until someone gets nervous.  As soon as that happens, you may be found to be “armed to the terror of the populace” and you may find yourself in trouble.  Again, check your state’s laws (and the laws of states you visit) for more information.

Having said that – I’ve got some opinions here.  Surprise, surprise.  My take is this: if you haven’t been convicted of a violent felony or adjudicated by the courts to be mentally deficient or found to have an intelligence quotient that would qualify you as mentally disabled (below 80), you should have the right to open or concealed carry without a license.  If you’ve been convicted of a non-violent felony or a misdemeanor,  you’ve served your full time including probation and parole, and you’ve gone 10 years without having another conviction, then I believe your full gun rights should be restored.

While I’m dreaming, I’d also like a pony and 100 bajillion dollars.

I guess the simplest point to all of the law questions is: be educated.  20 years ago, it was more difficult and sometimes you could slide on simply not knowing things.  Heck, 20 years ago, a woman carrying a gun in her purse often wouldn’t have a moment’s worth of trouble from the police who figured that an armed woman was better than a dead one.  Now the laws have changed, concealed carry is a state law (meaning that the state has a financially vested interest in you following the law that criminals aren’t going to follow anyway), and the cops presume that you’ve Googled all state laws regarding weapons carrying.  There’s a bit more freedom, but far less leeway.  Hunting laws are similar: there’s much less flexibility in their enforcement than there was in previous times, so you need to keep up to date on the laws, limits, and licensing.

Stay informed.  Stay frosty.

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Gun Week: What the 2nd Amendment Really Means

Today, we open up Gun Week here at PachydermsBlog, and we’re going to do so with a doozy.  We’re going to talk about the 2^nd Amendment, that controversial piece of legislation that keeps Americans armed and Gun Control advocates frightened and scrambling to redefine exactly what the Constitution clearly says.

So, I’m going to let Penn Jillette explain it to you:

He explains it masterfully, much more quickly than I’m about to.  First, he takes the text of the amendment, which reads thusly:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

For years, the debate has raged over the exact interpretation of this amendment.  Gun rights groups have tended to focus on the 2^nd half (shall not be infringed) while gun control groups have focused on the first half (a well-regulated militia).  The typical GC interpretation of this amendment is that since there’s a qualifier in the passage about a militia, then the 2^nd Amendment only applies to the states’ right to call up a militia, and since the national guard has replaced the militia, there is no need for common citizens to bear arms.

Jillette, however, disagrees – as do gun rights groups.  Their claim is that the qualifier in the Amendment was never designed to restrict access to guns, but instead provides historical context as to why the right of the people should not be infringed.  They argue that since the state has the right to arm itself, the people should be able to preserve the right to rebellion by taking up arms against it.

So…  the truth?  Honestly – a little bit of both.

First – the early nation did rely on the state-risen militia for regional defense.  It didn’t have the money to fully fund a full-time military and so the people, as they had under the English crown, could expect, at times, to be called up to serve as a part of their state’s militia, to act as a supplement to the national military.  However, we also have to understand the historical context as well.  The people writing this amendment had just fought a war for freedom against the British Empire using citizen soldiers and militia.

It’s also important to understand that the early legal theorists who studied the amendment shortly after its inception did so in direct contrast to the English Bill of Rights that allowed the right to bear arms on one hand, and then restricted that right to the very wealthy on the other, by allowing Parliament to pass laws that restricted gun ownership under the guise of protection of wild game.  At the same time, they also recognized that the right to bear arms was conditional: that there were circumstances where the government had the right to restrict the bearing of arms – however, they were very clear in their belief that the ultimate purpose of the second amendment was to allow the people a path to rebellion against tyranny.  And what’s the best way to repel tyranny enforced by military might?  Guns.

Keep in mind: fighting tyranny is exactly what the Bill of Rights is about.  James Madison stated that he supported the idea that “the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their government, whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purposes of its institution.”  The first 10 Amendments are built around this concept: protecting the citizenry and restricting Congress (1^st, 9^th, 10^th, and the later 27^th  – along with the unratified Congressional Apportionment Amendment), the military (2^nd, 3^rd), and the courts (4^th-8^th).  None of these amendments are designed, in any way, to restrict the right of the people.

In fact, as Jillette and Teller point out in the video above, the idea that there’s some sort of “breath” in the amendment doesn’t jive with the simple statement that the 2^nd half of the amendment clearly states: the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Usually this is where the discussion turns to the gun control advocates crying like children about how if the 2^nd Amendment allows guns, then it should allow common citizens to carry nuclear weapons, and common sense would dictate that this is a bad idea, right?  RIGHT?

Well, we’ll get to that later this week.  In the meantime, be calm and content with the fact that the framers distrusted the human greed for power enough to stick an amendment in the Constitution that forces the government to remember that its citizens are armed.

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Take Your Rhetoric and Speak It!

The next time a liberal talks about how we need to ramp down the tone of political discussion, I’d like to invite them to examine their own behavior first.  Then I’d tell them to shove it up their butts sideways.

Why?  Because the whole discussion going on nowadays after the reprehensible acts of a crazed loon is focusing on the wrong issues.  Jared Loughner a is a waste of flesh with no links to any political group, right wing or otherwise (although some of his statements do indicate left-line thinking).  It isn’t his politics – or any kind of political discussion – that drove him to do this.

The simple fact is that political discussion, like guns, video games, rock music, movies, TV, and potty training has become the latest boogeyman for those who don’t understand that people are not necessarily naturally good.  In fact, my own belief is that people aren’t good or evil – they’re sinful…  but not necessarily “evil”.  People become evil over time, whether through rotten upbringing, poor environment, bad genetics, nightmare experiences, screwed up chemicals, or hormones gone nuts.  Whatever the cause…   the root cause for a person’s decision to do evil comes down to that person and their choices.

The bigger danger here, in my opinion, is that those with power will take steps to ensure that this will “never happen again”…  by infringing upon the rights guaranteed us in the Constitution.  While it’s nice to say “we need to stop all the violent rhetoric”, it’s one thing to ask people to do so – it’s yet another to use the force of law to infringe the right of free speech or to further restrict our right to defend ourselves from people who have no concerns about such restrictions.  Our rights and freedoms cannot become the prisoners of those who misuse them.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll join me in prayer for the safe and full recovery of the victims of Jared Loughner, including Congresswoman Giffords.  May God grant healing to those who survived, peace to the families of those who died, and justice to their attacker.

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Just some numbers……

According to Fox news, the CBO has rated the cost of the Iraq war, and compared to the stimulus passed by the Obama administration the numbers are interesting.  You can read the Fox News report here. 

According to CBO numbers in its Budget and Economic Outlook published this month, the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom was $709 billion for military and related activities, including training of Iraqi forces and diplomatic operations.

The projected cost of the stimulus, which passed in February 2009, and is expected to have a shelf life of two years, was $862 billion. 

Here is another excerpt on the deficit according to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.

The U.S. deficit for fiscal year 2010 is expected to be $1.3 trillion, according to CBO. That compares to a 2007 deficit of $160.7 billion and a 2008 deficit of $458.6 billion, according to data provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.

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The Liars list.

 

The Complete List of Obama Statement Expiration Dates  provided by Jim Geraghty at NRO.

Here are some highlights:

STATEMENT: “These negotiations will be on C-SPAN, and so the public will be part of the conversation and will see the decisions that are being made.” January 20, 2008, and seven other times.

EXPIRATION DATE: Throughout the summer, fall, and winter of 2009 and 2010; when John McCain asked about it during the health care summit February 26, Obama dismissed the issue by declaring, “the campaign is over, John.”

STATEMENT: “No family making less than $250,000 will see any form of tax increase.” (multiple times on the campaign trail)

EXPIRATION DATE: Broken multiple times, including the raised taxes on tobacco, a new tax on indoor tanning salons, but most prominently on February 11, 2010: “President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.”

It is rather lenghty, but well worth a read.  Here is to “The One” who says one thing and does another.  Very typical of Washington and all that dwell there, but I think Obama and his people take it to another level.

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The Tampax Tax

“SEC. 4191. MEDICAL DEVICES. (a) IN GENERAL.—There is hereby imposed on the sale of any taxable medical device by the manufacturer, producer, or importer a tax equal to 2.3 percent of the price for which so sold. (b) TAXABLE MEDICAL DEVICE.—For purposes of this section— (1) IN GENERAL.—The term ‘taxable medical device’ means any device (as defined in section 201(h) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act) intended for humans. (2) EXEMPTIONS.—Such term shall not include— (A) eyeglasses, (B) contact lenses, (C) hearing aids, and (D) any other medical device determined by the Secretary to be of a type which is generally purchased by the general public at retail for individual use.’’

That’s right, ladies!  Lucky you!  You get to pay 2.3% more for your lady stuff. But fear not!  In our wonderful politically-correct world, fellas will have to pay more for their fella stuff…    I guess that means “condoms”, but I dunno.

Hey – you know what else will cost you an extra 2.3%?  Everything!

Band-aids? 2.3%.
Canes? 2.3%.
Compression stockings for diabetics? 2.3%.
Pill sorters? 2.3%.
ACE Bandages?  2.3%
Breast pumps for pumping milk for babies? 2.3%
Dentures, both partial and full 2.3%
Fetal cell-screening kit 2.3%
Female condoms, single use 2.3% (cuz girls can buy condoms, too!)
Treponemal syphilis test 2.3%
HIV saliva test kit 2.3%
Stair-climbing wheelchair 2.3%
Inflatable penis prosthetics 2.3% (do people actually buy these?)
Hip, knee, ankle, breast prosthetics 2.3%
IUDs 2.3%
Dialysis catheters 2.3%
Sickle-cell anemia tests 2.3%
Mammograms 2.3%

How’s that for a “tax on the rich”?  I sure am glad they covered pre-existing conditions for kids to make up for this stupidity…

Wait a minute…   seriously?  They forgot it?  Well, surely there aren’t other taxes  buried in there…

Wait a minute…  there are?  Well…   I guess I’d oppose it, but apparently, people who oppose government healthcare are terrorists.

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What happens when you don’t read the bill before you sign it:

“Hours after President Barack Obama signed historic health care legislation, a potential problem emerged. Administration officials are now scrambling to fix a gap in highly touted benefits for children.”

Here are a couple of articles that explain the dilemma.  As the comments over at Hot Air suggest, this is just another sign of incompetence for the Obama Administration.

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Remember when the focus in 2010 was going to be jobs?

Charles Schumer

“The president said the number one issue before us is jobs in 2010, and we couldn’t agree more, in fact the three top issues on our agenda are jobs, jobs and jobs”

The video below is under 2 minutes.  Take the time and watch it.  I can only assume by jobs the Democrats meant Health Care Reform.  The two terms are apparently synonymous.  I’m sure the focus will return to jobs after he is done with his “victory lap”, which is more likely to turn into an attempt to try and sell the already passed Health Care bill.  It is a little sad that there is a need to convince the public how great the bill is after it is passed.  There is a thought shared among the administration and Americans that support the bill that the public is misinformed about the bill.  I have heard it over and over.  Rest assured, those of us who are upset and that do not support the bill are not misinformed.  I have no doubt that the Presidents 51st , or 52nd  ”why we need to love this bill” speech in Iowa will do little to change the opposed minds.  It will however regurgitate the same talking points Obama has been using for the past year to feed the lemmings that so faithfully , blindly follow every word he utters.

Here is another 2 minute video with Obama telling  lying to us:

“The Public Will Have 5 Days To Look At Every Bill That Lands On My Desk”

Sure we will.  Anything else you want us to drink up???  The sweet drink is so easy for some to swallow. 

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