A friend is calling for President Joe Biden to be impeached, based on his failure to provide Americans with enough cheap energy. As source material, he cites this piece from Tucker Carlson.
I reply: (more…)
Racism has always been an intractable part of American society, but, as portrayed in this Norman Rockwell painting, it hasn’t always been overtly celebrated by tens of millions of hateful and ignorant white people.
In 2015, Donald Trump entered the political scene, and this segment of our population instantly became huge supporters.
Where this goes from here is anybody’s guess, but, as they say, it’s hard to put the toothpaste back into the tube.
Below is a presentation by the late Antonin Scalia, two-decade-serving associate justice of the U.S. Supreme court until his death in 2016. The subject: What makes America such a free country?
He concludes that it’s the separation of powers, especially, the independence of the judiciary, and the bipanel (House and Senate) legislature, which share (roughly) equal powers.
In truth, there is nothing wrong with what he said here; in fact, it’s entirely noncontroversial.
Where Scalia’s influence on our lives gets interesting lies in his belief in “originalism,” the concept that our laws are constitutional if and only if they conform to the explicit ideas that the founders had about them in the late 18th Century.
This makes subjects like the Second Amendment particularly troublesome. The founders talk about the “right to bear arms, ” but they said nothing about limiting the right to own nuclear weapons, nor the right of mentally disturbed individuals to own weapons of modern-day warfare that are designed to wipe out dozens of people in a matter of a few seconds.
Originalism seems just an indefensible excuse to prohibit the use of reason and common sense that might have been applied to make progress toward a safer, saner, and more just American society.
I’m sure many of us seniors, if we had the home ownership thing to do over, would opt out of the grass lawn paradigm. According to this piece by PBS, that’s exactly what more and more Americans are doing each year.
Given the loss of bees, this seems like an exceptionally good idea. How about some flower beds, fruit trees, and vegetables patches?
One has to laugh.
At this point it appears nearly certain that Trump will, in fact, lose his protection from the Secret Service. But, unless he leaves the country in favor of a nation that has no mutual extradition policies with the United States, his personal safety will be provided by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
One has to look upon the faces of the Secret Service agents here and feel sorry for them. They were groomed, then hand-selected, to protect the very best people who ever served America. And they wound up body-guards to a cold, calculating criminal.
Pardon the vulgarity, but this prompts me to make a point: There will come a day when buildings with the name “Trump” no longer exist.
Even today, hotel stays and conference event bookings at such locales are very low. Who on Earth would have a trade show for anything (except guns, or white supremacy, or evangelical Christianity) at a place like that?
Charged with seditious conspiracy, Oath Keepers’ leader Stewart Rhodes suddenly wants to testify in front of the January 6th Committee, in an effort to avoid dying in prison a few decades from now.
This, of course, raises the question: What does he have to say? If it’s that there was no coordination between his hate group and the White House, that hardly seems to hold any value in getting at the truth as to how the coup attempt was architected.
This is going to be great.
Another great meme on the eco-lawn.
One good thing about today’s world is its dismissal of traditions that add no value in our lives.
It wasn’t that long ago that the United States was well regarded around the globe for its fairness and highly functioning democracy.
Then came Donald Trump and three Supreme Court justices who rocked the world with a series of decisions from hell.
