Month: December 2019

Why term limits?  Just don’t let them start serving so early, and kick them out at a mandatory retirement age.

Resolved:  To Amend The Constitution Of The United States, as follows:

Sec. 1: The legal age of Majority for Citizens of the United States as well as all non-Citizens either resident or transient on the national territory of the United States shall be twenty-one (21) years of age.  Congress shall make no law restricting the minimum age for use of tobacco, tobacco-related, or alcoholic products.

Sec. 2: The minimum legal voting age shall be forty (40) years of age.

Sec. 3: The minimum age for election to serve in the House of Representatives shall be forty (40) years of age; in the Senate, forty-five (45) years of age; and to serve as President or Vice-President of the United States, fifty (50) years of age; notwithstanding that any person so serving as of the date of ratification of this Amendment, who does not meet this requirement and will not meet this requirement by the end of his or her current term of office, may continue to serve until the end of his or her current term of office.

Sec. 4: The mandatory retirement age for all elected officials under the United States, including Members of the House of Representatives and of the Senate, and the President and Vice-President of the United States, shall be seventy-five (75) years of age; notwithstanding that any person so serving as of the date of ratification of this Amendment, who has served more than one-half of his or her current term of office when reaching the mandatory retirement age, may continue to serve until the end of his or her current term of office.

Sec. 5: Unless otherwise prescribed by statute, this Amendment shall not be construed to apply to appointed officers of the United States, nor shall it be construed under any circumstances to apply to Judges serving Article III courts.

Sec. 6:  This is the Way. I have spoken.

You’re welcome.

Unless you make it personal.

The reason I’m waiting to see what John Durham has to say about the Trump/FBI imbroglio (as I don’t put much weight on either of the IG reports so far) is that I want to see both the process and the rule of law respected.  It’s not about political bias, as a NeverTrumper friend I just blocked on Facebook* claims it is. It’s about wrongful and illegal use of legal processes designed to ferret out and punish wrongdoers. It’s about lying about a phony secondhand report from a sketchy source to get a FISA warrant to spy on a candidate for elected office. It’s about the FBI’s off and on again investigation of the Clinton email scandal. It’s about a bunch of evil, lying sacks of shit going around with FBI badges and pretending to uphold the law. You know — the law they swore to uphold.

So far as I can see, the only wrongdoing in this entire mess was done by government officials who should have known better, but were so convinced that history would absolve them and fête them as heroes (because after all, Hillary! was going to be elected, so this would all get swept under the rug and there would be medals and promotions for all in her administration), they went ahead with their lying and misrepresentation anyway. And then, miracle of miracles, DJT got elected and THEY GOT CAUGHT RED HANDED.

As for the third report, my blocked friend implied that it’s going to be “a third IG report.” It’s not. It’s the Attorney General’s report, and as I had pointed out in the original FB post, John Durham is a US Attorney who has a lot more power than any Inspector General. IGs don’t have subpoena power, they can’t convene grand juries, and they can’t get warrants for arrests.  The fact that Durham is involved means it’s a criminal investigation at this point. And Durham is not known for letting things slide. There will be hell to pay for the FBI interfering in a national election and then trying to coup the lawfully-elected president, and all of the guilty know it.  Thus the mad scramble by the press and everyone else involved to claim Horowitz’s IG report vindicated all of them.  Not so fast, boys and girls.  AG Barr and US Attorney Durham don’t agree with Horowitz’s conclusions.  Act III is coming soon.  Make sure you’ve got popcorn.

Look, I don’t like Donald Trump, either. I was a NeverTrumper until Cruz pulled out (I have said this many times on this blog), and then I was damned if I was going to vote for a Green, or a Libertarian who had an anti-2A VP candidate, or Hillary!. But I can live with DJT being president.

You can hate Donald Trump all you want, but you MUST stand for upholding fairness and the rule of law. And right now, nobody on the left or in the NeverTrump camps seem to be doing that. And I can tell you that if this goes on, the next Democrat president (not to mention the next RINO Republican president) is going to have a really, really, REALLY rough ride.

All y’all done made the flyover folks mad. And we’re not taking it anymore.

_________________

* Because frankly I was sick and tired of the NeverTrump bullshit that I’ve been listening to him spew since 2016.  And he’s a meatspace friend, too, unfortunately.  NeverTrumpers just need to fuck off and die.  It’s too late for that shit — he’s been the duly elected and inaugurated president for nearly three years.  Stop beating that dead horse, for the love of all that’s holy.

’They murdered him:’ Family of UPS driver killed in shootout lashes out at police

Every officer involved should be locked up awaiting arraignment on murder or manslaughter charges. If heads don’t (figuratively) roll in Broward County for this, something dirty and evil is at work.

The officers:

• Never tried to negotiate, just started shooting
• Shot into the UPS van without any clue as to where the hostage or hostages might be (violations of Rules 2 and 4)
• Shot through the UPS van into their own people who had encircled the van (absolute violation of Rule 4)
• Effectively used innocent bystanders as human shields, which apparently got at least one innocent bystander shot (further violations of Rules 2 and 4)

Officers of the law are not military, they are civilians just like the civilians they claim to protect and serve. They have no right to simply start shooting at law-breakers indiscriminately, particularly when all of the points I just made are ignored. And even the military operates on more stringent rules of engagement than this. Soldiers have been court-martialed in Iraq for killing innocent civilians. How is this different?

Incidents like this are happening all over the country and are not being well-reported (no-knock raids that get cops and citizens alike killed, the phenomenon of “SWATting” where innocent people get 911 called on them as a prank or because someone doesn’t agree with them politically).

Look. I want to support the police, because I think they serve an important purpose in our society. But either they are no longer being trained properly, or these incidents are happening because the police really do think they are some sort of elite military cadre that can’t be touched for anything they do. If it’s the former, we can fix that. If it’s the latter, the officers who can’t stand down from that lofty but false perch need to be removed from the police force and never allowed to return. These are not feudal times and they are not the knights of the lord of the manor with a mandate to operate against the serfs with impunity.

Perhaps a good start to regaining public confidence in the police would be to stop providing them surplus military weapons and military vehicles and get them grounded back into the communities they serve.

As someone else said in another context, these guys make the FBI agents in Die Hard look good. And that raises another trenchant point:

Real life isn’t a got-damn movie. So stop acting like it is.

You really can outgrow your oldest friends.

Where did Justice Breyer get this cockamamie idea?

But in Massachusetts, historically, all the guns and ammunition were stored in a central place at night, I believe, at the time of the resolution — revolution. Not in anybody’s home.

— Justice Stephen Breyer, Transcript of Oral Arguments in NEW YORK STATE RIFLE & PISTOL ASSOCIATION, INC., ET AL., Petitioners, v. CITY OF NEW YORK, NEW YORK, ET AL., Respondents, p.60, lines 19-23.  Link to PDF

Must have been reading Michael Bellesiles, I guess.

What the fuck does Breyer think Massachusetts residents used to hunt, and to defend themselves from Indians?  They didn’t any more leave their rifles and ammunition in central armories at night than I park my car in a central government-managed garage at night and take the bus to go get it when I need it during the day.

Hey, maybe Breyer thinks they dialed 911 for Indian attacks, and got their meat at the supermarket like everyone else.

Chronic pain patients need advocates to champion the case for ending the war on pain pills. Congress and state legislatures alike should be ashamed of themselves, and should pay the price for their knee-jerk, “protect our phony baloney jobs” legislation on this and any number of other issues where they’ve screwed the pooch.

Whenever something legal gets abused, it’s always the people who were using it LEGALLY who get SCREWED. You can apply that principle across the board to anything you can think of. Guns, opioids, sinus medicine, tobacco, liquor, whatever, legislators have managed to make a royal mess of our lives and our rights.

Legal users ALWAYS get screwed while outlaws ignore the laws and regulations and just keep on keepin’ on. If you think for some reason that there’s no reason to vote, you are wrong; we need to vote to throw these meddling morons out of office and put people in who respect the rights of the people to live their lives, be at liberty, and to pursue happiness. And I don’t care if they’re D’s or R’s, if they vote for this sort of thing, they need to go.

You cannot have life, liberty, and happiness when you are in constant pain without any hope of relief.

End the War on Pain Pills. Now.