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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The Problem With Separation of Church and State

School in the…   wait for it…  liberal Democrat-leaning state of New York…  censored an art student’s contribution to a mural.  They had tons of religious imagery on the wall, but the minute a student who believed that Jesus was the Way, the Truth, and the Life decided to paint a cross and a few song lyrics, the school felt that she’d crossed the line.

Scary!

Painting a mosque?  Fine.  A demonic creature?  A-OK.   The Taj Mahal?  10-4.  A Native American totem pole?  Yee-hah.  A cross?  BLACKLIST THE TWIT!!!

Look, I’m all for not pushing religion on people.  I am a dedicated, strong, stubborn Christian, but I know that there are people who neither share my faith nor want to share my faith.  And while I do believe I am called to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to let you know the Good News that He can save you from your sins and the penalty to come if you only repent and believe in Him…  but I’m also well aware that the best way to communicate the Gospel is to build a personal relationship with people and to meet them where they are so that you can point them to the Cross.  An ineffective method would be sticking students in a classroom and indoctrinating them via a state-approved religious curriculum.

Having said that, there seems to be a mistake made by the anti-religious crowd and bureaucrats, that our precious little angels – and by extension, our precious little public – must be freed from any expression of religious (read: Christian) belief in the public circle.  They crow about the separation of church and state and point out that the Supreme Court has ruled that prayer isn’t allowed in any classroom, ever!  Ha ha ha!

Silly people.  Silly, evil people.

Let’s take a quick look at the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

There’s a lot of meat in there, but it’s meat that’s easily identified and served up. Let’s stick with just the stuff that sticks with this case.

1.  Congress shall make no law.  This is pretty simple: the first amendment is a restriction on the actions of Congress, not the people.  Much like the 2nd Amendment protects the right to bear arms, the First Amendment protects the rights of the people.

2.  An establishment of religion.  Again, pretty simple: Congress is not allowed to declare an official religion of the United States.  This was because many of the American colonies were founded by Christian people for religious purposes, and those Christian groups sometimes didn’t get along, sometimes even with themselves.  By avoiding the establishment of a national religion, those debates were rendered moot at the Federal level, even though every single colony still acknowledged Almighty God in their charters.  Today, this has been extended to other religions.

3.  Or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.  The Federal Government cannot keep you from practicing your religion.  If you want to practice Voodoo, that’s your business (so long as you’re not breaking any laws in doing so).

4.  Or abridging the freedom of speech.  Again, while there are reasonable limits placed on this right (you can’t yell fire in a theater, you can’t threaten someone’s life, etc.), it’s typically accepted that the government is not allowed to tell you what you can and cannot say.  Simple?  Sure.

So where did we get lost?  In my ever-loving opinion, it started in the 1980′s, when the Supreme Court ruled in Abington Township v. Schempp , where they introduced the “secular vs. religious” test.  Later, in Allegheny County v. Greater Pittsburgh ACLU, the court went full retard, ruling that having the words “Gloria in Exelcis Deo” was illegal because that was totally religious, but it was OK to have a Menorah, because that’s totally secular.  By entertaining a micromanagement approach towards the free exercise of religion, the Court empowered those who want to push a secularist religion like atheism.

This leads to incidents like this, where the same people who thought it was evil, wrong, super-evil censorship to ban the sale of 2 Live Crew albums in Florida think it’s perfectly OK to paint over a student’s artistic expression of admiration for her God because, Lord knows someone might see her picture and get magically forced by the school board to join the Baptists.  They’re so busy enforcing point #2 of the amendment that they miss #3 and #4.  They’re taking a very liberal view of the constitution, where one can change the plain meaning of the constitution as it suits the situation (hence why I join Alonzo Rachel in rejecting “progressive” as a label for people who are more accurately described as “liberal”).  This liberal view means that the freedom of those who should be protected by the constitution is subject to the whims of a government bureaucrat.

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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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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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Attention Conservatives: Stop Being Stupid

As anyone who’s read this blog over the past few years (including the desert years of 2009-2011) knows, I’m more than happy to hold those on the left accountable for their idiocy and to call them to task for being…  well…  illogical and willfully stupid.  And so, some people may think that my laser beam of stupid is aimed only at liberals and that I’m unwilling to hold my own – or myself – accountable.  Those people would be wrong.

Marco Rubio – Apparently, a Liberal

When it comes to politics, I’m a solid right-conservative.  My Political Compass rating (an excellent test for determining your personal beliefs, even if their analysis of public figures is way off – they rank Obama as a right-authoritarian) is a 7.12 economic and 0.15 social, so you know where I’m coming from: a fairly Reaganesque, but not hard-right conservative.  And as conservative as I am, I am well aware of the fact that there are those who do not share my beliefs.  The last 5 Republican Presidential nominees and presumptive nominees (Romney, McCain, Bush II, Dole, and Bush I) have all been much more moderate than my own beliefs.  And yet, though these differences existed, I came to the conclusion that, at the end of the day, my 80% political friend was not my political enemy.

And yet, what I see happening on the right now is to take Reagan’s sage advice to his staff back in 1972 (“The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally — not a 20 percent traitor”) and flush it down the commode in an attempt to find the mystical “perfect candidate”.  It goes to the point of people misunderstanding what conservatism really is, and calling out anyone who disagrees with us on a single issue.  Example? OK.  I’ve heard more than one conservative call out Marco Rubio as an imperfect RINO in waiting because, according to them, he supports the DREAM Act (or at least, a version of it).

OK, let’s think about this for a minute.  First – let’s talk about his version of the DREAM Act and what it really is.  First – it’s not even on the table yet.  It’s not even been proposed.  However, the word on the street is that the revised DREAM Act being proposed will basically allow children (who cannot be legally responsible) who were brought over the border by their parents (not of their own free will) who work to complete school, register for selective service, and be good citizens (no troublemakers or layabouts allowed) an opportunity to work within the existing immigration system (not creating a pathway to citizenship, thus preserving our existing investment in our legal immigrants) to stay in the country (rather than being thrown back over the border to a country they may not even remember).  In other words: it allows kids who had no choice in becoming illegal immigrants both an impetus to be good people and an opportunity to become law-abiding adults without ignoring their status as an illegal immigrant.  Simply put: this is a good thing.

Let me say it again: providing people who were unwillingly dragged into breaking the law an opportunity to follow the law is a good thing.  Period.

And yet, there are way too many conservatives who are ready to throw Rubio under the bus because he won’t toe the hard-line school of “we don’t care if they haven’t lived in Mexico since they were 2 – throw them back over the border”.  Marco Rubio.  A man whose voting record has earned him a 100% rating from the American Conservative Union, whose record of conservative leadership in Florida has earned him the respect of people around this country. A man whose common-sense responsible conservatism has earned him a potential tap as the Vice Presidential nominee of our country.

And these idiots are calling him a RINO, not because he HAS stepped out of line on an issue…  but because he MAY step out of line on an issue.  Ditto with other conservatives, including some of the most conservative members of Congress out there.

We saw it all primary season long…  Republican candidates who would rise up to challenge Mitt Romney and then get knocked down by the conservative branch because they weren’t the perfect conservative candidate that Ronald Reagan was (the same Reagan who raised taxes, spent money like water – arguably with good reason, and who provided blanket amnesty for a group of illegal immigrants).  Tim Pawlenty (a strong mainstream conservative whose sin was supporting cap and trade), Rick Perry (another mainstream conservative who supported vaccinating girls against cancer and supported the Trans-Texas Corridor), Newt Gingrich (a successful conservative leader with a 90% ACU rating who got in trouble for global warming and for opening his mouth too much).  And the result: we’re left with Mitt Romney…  whose lifetime ACU Rating is 55.

Congrats, conservatives.  Thanks to you throwing good candidates under the bus, we’re left with a middle-ground squish.  Mission Accomplished!  And now, having learned absolutely nothing from the Primaries, you turn your attention to demonizing some of the most conservative people in this country because they’re not good enough on maybe – MAYBE one issue.  They’re like the geniuses who refused to vote for Sarah Palin for Vice President because a woman’s place is, apparently, in the home, ignoring the fact that she was a successful, inspirational administrator with a conservative and anti-corruption record longer than the Alaskan coastline.

So, this is my love letter to my fellow conservatives, and as much as it hurts me to say it: stop being idiots.  You’re acting like a bunch of retards.  As much as I loathe Romney’s moderate politics, you’re going to have to admit that it’s you conservatives who got us into this mess with him as a candidate because you were too focused on nuking your own wounded and not building a consensus candidate that could appeal to the entire party.  You were too busy running the bus over the people who failed the perfect-conservative litmus test and not busy at figuring out how to play a political game that requires more finesse than a Sherman Tank and that doesn’t alienate 30% of your potential voters.

Or, you could at least try to act like adults.  That would be a nice change.

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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 Sajak is right

 

Finally a voice of reasoning from Hollywood other than Charlie Daniels or Jon Voight.  Mr. Pat Sajak gives us, I mean “the global warming crowd” , (yes the same group of people that believe it is possible for humans to affect the climate of the earth) some very pratical ways they can pracitce what they preach.  Maybe just a little leading by example?

Let’s assume that a third of the world’s population really believes mankind has the power to adjust the Earth’s thermostat through lifestyle decisions. The percentage may be higher or lower, but, for the sake of this exercise, let’s put it at one-third. Now it seems to me these people have a special obligation to change their lives dramatically because they truly believe catastrophe lies ahead if they don’t. The other two-thirds are merely ignorant, so they can hardly be blamed for their actions.

Now, if those True Believers would give up their cars and big homes and truly change the way they live, I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some measurable impact on the Earth in just a few short years. I’m not talking about recycling Evian bottles, but truly simplifying their lives. Even if you were, say, a former Vice President, you would give up extra homes and jets and limos. I see communes with organic farms and lives freed from polluting technology.

Then, when the rest of us saw the results of their actions—you know, the earth cooling, oceans lowering, polar bears frolicking and glaciers growing—we would see the error of our ways and join the crusade voluntarily and enthusiastically.

This should at least win idea of the day?  Maybe idea of the week or even month?  The problem is, the lefty environmentalist only want you to “Do as I say, not as I do”.  All Pat is asking is,  if you are so serious about all of this, show us the way.  We will follow suit like Lemmings off a cliff as soon as we are  visually enlightened by all of the “Global Warming” rhetoric, babble and smoke blowing.

Until then, stop trying to pass laws that will apply new taxes and fees to the citizens of the United States.  Quit telling us we need to buy florecent bulbs because they are better for the environment.  (Did you know that is the reason the fish in WI have high mecury levels is because people are too lazy to drive down to the local hardware stores to recycle them.  I’m sure it’s just the conservative-Republican earth haters though)  Please, no more telling us that we need to drive a car that wouldn’t survive a collision with a moped to save the environment.  For the love of Pete stop telling us to do all of the things that are going to save the planet and bankrupt us in the process. All the while still traveling in your private or commercial jets and trying to off set your pollution with carbon credits/offsets. 

I know it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy that you can still be a pollution hog and just offset your destruction of our planet by shuting off your computer at night, turning off the water while you brush your teeth, or using candles to read.  But the fact is that every time you hop on that plane, or get in your car, you are polluting.  You can’t take it away with a shower every three days.

Anyway, I think Pat Sajak is on to something here.  And for the record, there is no one who is a conservative that is of sound mind, who really wants to destroy the earth.  Be assured, sleep well at night knowing that we want to protect the earth and conserve it as well.

Side note:  I know that the Price is right is not Sajak’s game show, but I thought I’d use it anyway in the title.

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