Metaphorically speaking, of course. The real war may come later, or not. Time will tell.

I am frankly astonished that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, bought the bull***t about the ObamaCare individual mandate being a tax, and not a tax, or both being a tax and not being a tax, or some such confusing nonsense. It reminds me of the joke about how many Zen Buddhists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer is four: One to change it, one to not change it, one to both change it and not change it, and one to transcend the experience.

That’s sort of funny. But this ruling is no laughing matter, because there is no way to transcend the experience.

In case anyone was wondering, and I am fairly certain you weren’t, I won’t be purchasing “comprehensive” health insurance. I will continue to purchase my “Hail Mary” policy, now called something else to skirt the BarryCare rules. I will continue to pay for my Pap smears and aspirin and occasional stitches out of pocket. And I won’t pay the damned tax penalty for managing my health care in the way I see fit.

Yeah, you heard me, Barry. F*** you and your tax that isn’t a tax but also is a tax. (Explain to me again why the Anti-Injunction Act doesn’t apply if the tax that isn’t a tax is in fact a tax. That seems odd.) You’re as confused about that as you are about your “date rape” mentality that assures you that doing things to people that they do not want done is totally okay.  read more »

Can’t flippin’ STAND Rosie Perez, but that was one of the great lines from White Men Can’t Jump.  (I’m still baffled by that “can’t hear Jimmy” stuff, but that’s a different discussion for another day.)

The Supreme Court has spoken about Arizona’s controversial law regarding illegal aliens, and they said…

No, no, no, and YES.

The portions of the law making it a state crime to be in the country illegally and requiring the arrest of those suspected of being illegal aliens, failing to carry with you proof that you ARE here legally, and illegally seeking employment, were struck down.  At first I was all bummed out, and then I slogged through the reading of the decision, and suddenly, it made sense.  Arizona doesn’t need to codify those things in state law, because federal law already exists spelling out those issues.  read more »

Lisa Brown is a state representative in Michigan. She has been barred from speaking on the floor of the state House because she blathered on about her vagina, a situation she is quite peeved about. She claims her vagina shouting was in the context of legislation regarding women’s health care, so that makes it all right.

It is NOT all right. I’m sure there is a time and a place to shout “Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!” The august halls of a legislative body really isn’t it, though.

When I was growing up, I attended a class called White Gloves And Party Manners. The course, spanning three months of Saturdays at Flah’s department store, taught a girl everything she needed to know about being socially graceful. I know which utensils to use and when, how to sit and even how to curtsy, how to be a good guest, how to address royalty and heads of state if I happen to be introduced to them, and yes, how to keep my white gloves nice.

Nowhere in all of that instruction did they ever mention that it was a good idea for me to publicly discuss my vagina should I be elected to political office.  read more »

All Venezuela’s dictator Hugo Chávez ever wanted for America was a dictator just like him running the show.  And now we have one.

It isn’t just the Fast & Furious cover-up, although that IS a very big deal.  Invoking executive privilege to keep documents under wraps is a big deal.  What leaves me completely baffled is, if the White House knew nothing about the monkey poop fight at the zoo known as Fast And Furious, then what possible authority allows the assertion of that privilege?  Either Obama and Holder knew that gun dealers in Arizona were told by the BATF to sell guns to straw buyers, or they didn’t.  Either they knew that 1,000 of those guns had gone missing, or they didn’t.

Richard Nixon taught us that the chief executive cannot invoke executive privilege to cover up screwing the pooch.  Or rather, the Supreme Court taught us that, when they slapped Tricky Dick around and made him cough up his tapes.  (Somehow, eavesdropping on your opponent seems quite mild compared to losing track of 1,000 firearms and having a few of them turn up in investigations of murdered law enforcement agents.  Your mileage may vary.)  That this allegedly brilliant Constitutional scholar doesn’t know he can’t use the privilege in that way makes him look like a clown in charge of a very warped circus.  read more »

Everyone milled about anxiously, waiting with bated breath to hear if today would be the day that the Supreme Court handed down their decision on ObamaCare, or perhaps Arizona’s law regarding illegal aliens.  But alas, it was not to be.  With a giant exhale on the order of the massive toilet flush after the last episode of M*A*S*H (yes, that epic flush really did drop a reservoir 27 feet), the disappointed court-watchers went home to wait until Thursday, the next round of breath-bating.

That means they missed something kind of important.  Rather, it is something important if you live in a state that has Indian tribes.

The case is Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians v. Patchak.  One Mr. David Patchak claimed that turning what is known as the Bradley Tract, in Wayland township, Michigan, into an Indian casino would result in economic, environmental, and aesthetic harm.  The tribe’s and the government’s defense was that the provisions of the Indian Relocation Act barred lawsuits intended to prevent putting land in trust and its ultimate development.  The Supreme Court held that the Department of the Interior cannot take land into the reservation system without considering its intended end use, and any objections to that use.  read more »

Can a president really just say “I know the law reads a certain way, but I don’t like it, so I’m going to issue an executive order to change it”?

Having had a few hours to digest the bypassing of Congress to inflict the DREAM ACT on America, I have a few comments and questions.

My first comment is to the girl on the right in this photo:

I don’t know.  What does an illegal alien look like?  Since illegal aliens come from many dozens of different countries, there is no “look” associated with them.  “Illegal alien” is a legal status, not a race or ethnicity.  To say they all look the same is like saying all felons look the same.  There’s plenty of room for everybody on the Criminal Train.  read more »

A gentleman named Mark Regnerus has done a study of gay parenting that has a lot of people in a lather. You can read his Slate article about it here. He is being criticized for having an agenda, being a bigot, a homophobe, and a Christian zealot. No word on whether anyone has called his mother an astronaut yet.

His study finds that children who spend a portion of their childhood being parented by same-sex partners, a gay single parent, or a “mixed orientation” couple, are, as adults, “more apt to report being unemployed, less healthy, more depressed, more likely to have cheated on a spouse or partner, smoke more pot, had trouble with the law, report more male and female sex partners, more sexual victimization, and were more likely to reflect negatively on their childhood family life, among other things.” He adds that while the study did not attempt to determine causation, it could be due to the instability of their living situations.

I wasn’t the least bit surprised.  read more »

Sometime in the next couple of weeks, we will see what the Supreme Court is going to do about ObamaCare, or BarryCare as I call it, because it is a more euphonious moniker.  I have no crystal ball, so I do not know what the Court’s decision will be.  The predictions market InTrade, however, has a very definite opinion.  The share price for the individual mandate being overturned spiked after that Vermicelli dude or whatever his name is ended up looking like an incompetent boob during the oral arguments in March.  The price continues to climb as the rendering of the decision gets closer, and the prediction for overturning the mandate has been as high as 72.3%.

I don’t like the individual mandate on philosophical grounds.  I also don’t like it because it pees in my Wheaties in terms of how I procure my health care.  I choose to carry a “Hail Mary” policy in case I accidentally lop my leg off with a chainsaw and might like it reattached.  I pay for the routine stuff out of pocket, mostly because my physician doesn’t accept insurance.  A rather large portion of what he does isn’t covered by insurance, so he chooses not to go through the paperwork hassles.  read more »

Just kidding.

I am reading with fascination the tales of the protests by students in Montreal today.  There is a Formula One race going on there, and people from around the world show up.  (I hope that Austin, Texas is ready for them come November.  F1 fans are really quite something.  I’m still laughing about the culture shock when they tried Formula One here in Phoenix twenty years ago.  To say that almost nothing went right is an understatement.)

The students are protesting tuition hikes at their universities, and capitalism in general.  Their hope was to create such a disturbance that the race would be shut down.  That worked in Bahrain last year, but I would venture to say that the average Canadian student has it a bit better than the average impoverished goat-herder in a Middle Eastern country with limited liberties and no economic opportunity.  So protest seemed unlikely to find success in the land of poutine.  read more »

The American Dream isn't dead.  It just needs a little CPR.

Wisconsin spoke loudly on Tuesday about their state's direction.  The capitalist incumbent won out over the collectivist challenger.  When you beat someone twice, you are doing right things right.  Nationwide, we have settled into the idea of Mitt Romney as the republican candidate.  Five months remain between now and the general election.  The Obama administration says this Wisconsin result is not meaningful.  I am absolutely certain they are wrong.

(I promised I wouldn't gloat.  I really tried not to.  Somehow, though, Read 'Em And Weep has made it onto my playlist about 25 times today.  Barry Manilow looks very very gay in the video, but what can one expect from a dude in clown makeup?  And while we are mocking people, let's jump on the crying Barrett supporter.  The death of democracy as we know it?  Whatever, you blubbering idiot.)

Now that we see which way the winds are blowing, everyone has some soul-searching to do.
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