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 »

You probably haven’t heard much about this, but the same Obama Justice Department that is pushing to deny states the right to define marriage (by opposing the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act) is now pushing to diminish the ability of states to regulate gambling.

In years past, Congress took action to stop the spread of gambling across state lines with legislation such as the Wire Act and the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act.  All along, Congress’ position has been clear and consistent that it opposes allowing technology to be used to circumvent individual state gambling laws.

Enter the Obama Justice Department, which this past December quietly issued a decision interpreting these acts of Congress “not” to apply to anything other than sports betting.

Aside from undermining the long established will of Congress, the practical problem is that this decision would allow any form of gambling that is legal in any state to be made available on the Internet and circumvent the gambling laws of others states.  The net effect is that any state could effectively legalize virtually any form of gambling for the entire country, whether we like it or not.

Ready or not, nationalized gambling here we come.  read more »

With Wisconsin recall election exit polling data showing 27% of union members voted for Governor Walker and the last Marquette University poll before the election, indicating the total was closer to 40%, Ed Schultz of MSNBC demanded to know why union members would vote for Scott Walker.

I thought I’d write a response: Ed, as a former member of a public employee union, let me count the reasons:

1. Pro-life issues. 99% of union political contributions go to Democrat Party candidates. Pro-life politicians have become virtually extinct in the Democrat Party. Instead, Democrats at all levels compete with each other to be the candidate who promises the most radical pro-abortion agenda. With this incredible imbalance of contributions, public employee unions have become the major financial source for pro-abortion politicians. Wisconsin Planned Parenthood, of course, endorsed the recall. When I attend pro-life rallies, it is so heartwarming to see people in their green AFSCME t-shirts shouting obscenities at us. The fact is, these days no pro-life candidate of either party, would get a penny in contributions from public employee unions.  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 »

Liberals conspired for two years to plant a web of technologically sophisticated, hard-to-defuse bombs across the country’s urban and suburban centers, explosives that sparked up here and there frightening people and were programmed to detonate four years later.

Conservative SWAT teams screamed and pleaded and begged the public not to let them do it, and tried to stop the impending carnage via arguments, campaigns, and ultimately elections.  Liberals just laughed at the chaos like the Joker.

Twenty-six states sought intervention from the Supreme Court, which may be on the verge of defusing the bombs, and if the Court doesn’t do it the next Republican Congress will.  The right inevitably will spread collateral damage as they storm into downtown areas cordoning off districts, deactivating trigger devices, resetting timers, and safely dismantling and clearing out every last bomb.

Naturally, the media are blaming conservatives for the mess they’re going to make clearing out the explosives liberals planted.

The bombs in question are, of course, the various provisions of Obamacare.  The disorder left by conservatives’ clearing them out constitutes “messy ripple effects” the mainstream media are warning about if conservatives get their way.  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 »

Some of the most enduring images of the great depression of 1929-1939 are those of long lines of obviously beaten-down men in soup lines… hungry women and children with haunted eyes. Shantytowns sprang up all over the country, called Hoovervilles in mocking derision of the disastrous policies that engendered the crash and the even worse schemes which perpetuated the depression until 1939 and the advent of the Second World War.

Twenty five per cent unemployment… some eleven million three hundred thousand people lost their jobs, homes and farms, out of a pre-depression population of 120 million. Contrast that to today, with a population of over 312.8 million with some 27 million American workers no longer on the unemployment rolls. These folks didn’t just fly to never-never land. They are the flotsam and jetsam of Barack Hussein Obama and his DeMarxists’ living fantasies. It’s that pesky hopey changey thing again.

Today, there are forty five million plus families dependent on food stamps in Barack Hussein Obama’s ‘Ameritopia’ (thanks, Mark Levin). There are 15.7 million Americans officially out of work, despite all the DeMarxist spin to the contrary. In Barack Hussein Obama’s America, one million one hundred thousand jobs were lost by women. So much for the Republicans’ and Mitt Romney’s supposed ‘war on women’.  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 »

It was a solemn scene. What began as an upbeat assemblage rife with hope and optimism quickly turned upside down into a somber, grief stricken gathering. As Governor Scott Walker put a stranglehold on the Wisconsin recall election a gut wrenching sickness descended upon the Tom Barrett rally in the same way it descends upon Wrigley Field when the Cubs tease their fans every ten years or so with a playoff appearance, deluding them into thinking they might actually win a world series before getting swept out of the playoffs.

When MSNBC this same sickness fell heavy upon Ed Schultz. In fact if I didn’t know any better I would have guessed that Schultz was broadcasting live from Tom Barrett’s wake rather than his rally. For a moment I thought Schultz was going to break down in a tear-filled rant like this guy. Hmmm … it seems I’ve answered my own question. I guess The Ed Show was in fact overseeing the passing of a deceased spirit. It was democracy that died on Tuesday night. Yeah … right.  read more »