How Would You Do It?

The founders of our fine republic didn't like government all that much, so they structured the constitution to limit its powers. They did a damned good job of it overall -- the government stayed limited for, oh, 150 years or so. However, since the new deal the government has grown faster than my man parts when I see a pic of Salma Hayek. Not a good thing.

That's made me wonder: did the founders miss something when writing the constitution? Is there something they should have put in there to make their goal of limited government more explicit? Could they have prevented the growth of the leviathan somehow?

If there were a revolution tomorrow and you were put in charge, what would you do to make sure that down the road we wouldn't be in the same pickle that we are now?

Why I Am Not a Vegan

- Neaderpundit's bacon-wrapped deer tenderloin medallions. Oh my those look good.

- the self-righteous tone of this vegan's passive-aggressive note enrages me.

- The Porkgasm. 'Nuff said.

I Have to Concur with Jennifer (language NSFW)

Jennifer from In Jennifer's Head writes:

Dear Cancer,
Fuck you!
You know, I’ve seen quite enough of you in my circle of friends, family, and co-workers.  Some nerve you’ve got showing up around here again.
Bastard.
If only I knew the right caliber to use on you, I would hunt you down.  Instead, I’ll trust the doctors to help her out.
But you?  I wish you’d die in a fire already.  Fuck you.

Hear hear! Fuck cancer.

Saturday morning we bury my wife's aunt, who passed at age 58 after a 2-year fight with ovarian cancer. Today I got an email from my father saying that my grandfather was diagnosed with stage 4 liver and pancreatic cancer, and has around 6 months to live.

Yeah, fuck cancer.

Enough!

Over at the Castle Gormogon the wise and mighty 'Puter has hit one out of the park. An excerpt:

We are sick and tired of working long and hard, whether laying brick or writing briefs, and sending a significant and ever-rising chunk of our pay to Washington and our state capitals where it is squandered.
We are sick of overweening government bureaucrats who think they know how to live our lives better than we do. We can't have 100 watt light bulbs because they use too much electricity. We can't have trans-fats because you've decided they are bad for us. We can't have a toilet that will efficiently dispose of a normal-sized crap because too many people moved to California and sucked all the water out of the ground. We can't be trusted to use fireworks or firearms responsibly. We have to buy health insurance, because you've decided it's for our own good. Garbage. You can't even run your own lives, I'll be damned if you'll run mine.
We are sick of being told by elites what to think and how to think it. We are racist or backwards if we disagree with elites. We are not morons. Many of us are well educated, and darn near all of us possess common sense, the least common of all gifts. Your Ivy League degree means crap to us when your policies have bankrupted our country. Try eating that sheepskin when you find you can't get a job in the real world.
We are truly enraged by the lifestyles others are living on our dime, be they poor who refuse to work or congressmen who do likewise. We are told that we must subsidize these folks. It is our duty. Yet there is no duty from our wards back to us. No duty to learn a skill. No duty to find a job. No duty to behave responsibly. No duty not to get carelessly and needlessly knocked up, locking another innocent into a lifetime of poverty. No duty to abide by basic human societal norms. It's all taking and no giving. This, as Sen. Moynihan sagely noted, is a recipe for societal disintegration, and that's what we're seeing right now.

Go RTWT right now.

I'm Going Where the Sun Keeps Shining

After six years of planning, we're finally moving from Connecticut to Florida. The Boy™ has finally graduated high school, and we've married off* The Girl™, so we can put New England in our rear view mirror and go to where the weather suits our clothes. Now that Connecticut is fully in the hands of the Democrats Kleptocrats, it looks like we're leaving just in time.

For the last 20 years CT has had a Republican governor -- since the Democrats instituted an income tax. The legislature has always been filled with dems, but at least they were tempered by a Republican governor. In fact, John Rowland (2 governors ago) was consistently rated the most fiscally responsible governor in the country (until, of course, he was convicted of corruption, but you'll have that).

Anyhow, that all ended last November. The wise people of Connecticut elected Democrat "Dannel" Malloy, a career politician (except for a brief stint as a prosecutor, natch), to be our new Governor.  Since then, the government has done everything possible to drive the state into a ditch.

They started with higher taxes, of course. Higher income taxes, and sales tax increases from 6 to 6.35%. Higher taxes on gasoline, hotel rooms, cigarettes, alcohol and rental cars. In addition, scores of now-exempt services and products would be subject to sales taxes, including haircuts, car washes, luxury goods, yoga studios, pet grooming, cosmetic surgery and hazardous waste removal.¹

The sales tax increase took place on July 1st, and that morning I had to stop by my local garage to check on my car. As I arrived I saw a woman scurry out, and the owner of the garage said that was the local tax collector. Evidently they were going around to every business in the area and assessing a tax on all current inventory -- to make sure not a penny of the sales tax was missed. Lovely!

In addition to the taxes, they've also mandated paid sick leave for all companies with more than 50 employees. Now, most companies of that size already offer sick leave as part of a benefits package, but the rest of them (mostly restaurants, stores, and other low-end service businesses) have to pay up as well. It already costs more to operate a business in CT than almost any other state in the country, and this just makes it worse. It's like CT is trying to drive as many companies out of the state as possible.

They also passed another interesting bill, dubbed the "Bathroom Bill". In short, that bill requires that transexual and transgendered individuals be given access to women's facilities, including public and private women's restrooms, locker rooms and showers.


On the surface, this bill appears perfectly legitimate: “An Act Concerning Discrimination”. It prevents “Discrimination” in the title, what could be wrong with that?I have no problems at all with gay or transgendered/transsexual people -- who cares how someone dresses or with whom they have sex? However, this new law opens the door for a sexual predator to claim transgendered status, and gain access to   victims' showers, changing rooms, and bathrooms. That just doesn't seem like a great idea to me. 


There is one decent law they passed, believe it or not. They've decriminalized small amounts of pot, which is a good thing. Now you can have up to 1/2 pound of cannabis -- a significant amount! -- and only get a $150 ticket. Finally a sane drug law in the state -- and the first law the assembly passed that'll actually save the state money!


Of course, in the same session the senate voted to make posession of *synthetic* cannabis a crime punishable by a $1000 fine and up to 1 year in jail. So, in short, you can have good weed in the state, but none of the crappy stuff. It must be a quality assurance plan for pot! Next up: a ban on ditch weed. Only high-quality hydro for CT!

So yeah, CT is a mess. The Democrats in the state are acting like the Democrats in Washington -- they're trying to do as much damage as possible before the grownups get back in power. I'm so glad to be moving somewhere a bit more civilized.



* well, they're moving down with us, but at least she's married now, right?

If you're seeing this through RSS, this post has very NSFW language

And, to protect my fair readers, a paragraph of lorem ipsum to keep bad words off their homepages:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent eget nisi quis est laoreet condimentum. Nulla facilisi. Donec dolor erat, gravida consectetur sollicitudin a, ultricies sed lectus. Nullam at viverra ligula. Cras magna eros, ultricies ornare consectetur non, varius eu risus. Sed nunc mi, aliquet vel congue eu, aliquam a odio. Sed tempor nulla nec est tempus et consequat magna convallis. Suspendisse sagittis, est non pharetra vulputate, tortor enim tristique orci, vel pretium lectus turpis vel nunc. Sed ut nulla erat. Pellentesque aliquam vulputate sem sit amet dignissim. Aliquam neque turpis, vulputate nec dapibus at, feugiat vitae elit. Vestibulum ac eros erat, eget elementum felis. Duis in consequat mauris. Nunc tincidunt, turpis consectetur laoreet sagittis, sapien lacus convallis dui, vitae gravida lorem justo ut justo. Quisque bibendum tempus nibh sed facilisis. Cras vel risus vitae est scelerisque sollicitudin in a orci. Mauris tortor metus, dapibus at imperdiet sed, congue vel mi.

And now, to the news:

“Any changes to Medicare must strengthen the Medicare system and improve the health of our seniors,” Pelosi said in a statement. “It is unfair to ask seniors to get less in benefits and wait longer to get onto Medicare — all while Republicans back tax breaks for Big Oil and corporations that ship American jobs overseas.”

-- Nancy Pelosi


AAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! Drown in a bucket of cum, you malevolent whote! The sooner someone shoves a stake through what used to be your heart the sooner this country can become unfucked. I hope you die of ass cancer while suffering from full-body burns, you ascerbic cunt!

</rant>

I apologize to my less wine-besotted readers for my foul language, but that just irked me a little bit.

Let Freedom Ring! Let the White Dove Sing! (previously: Holy Crap! Cory Maye is to be Released!)

If you don't know about Cory Maye, then read the summary here. If you do, then you know what a travesty of justice it is that he was ever convicted in the first place (let alone sentenced to death). It's a travesty that he had to plead guilty to manslaughter, but hell, he'll be free.

Radley Balko deserves a lot of credit for this. He's been on the case for years, and brought a lot of attention (and evidence) to the case.

edit: I concur with #33: July 1st shall henceforth be known as Radley Balko Day!

edit #2: I agree with #40: What a great way to kick off independence day!

I read a lot of medical blogs. I find the topic of medicine interesting, and they're frequently rather funny. Of course, having such an interest means you'll occasionally have topics like "Can cunnilingus cause intraabdominal free air?" screaming its way across your RSS reader! (incidentally, the answer is yes¹)

Anyhow, that's not the purpose of this post. One of the doc bloggers I follow is Doctor Wes, a cardiac electrophysiologist out of Illinois. He points out that doctors aren't allowed to own hospitals, because there's a risk of self-referring. However, insurance companies are allowed to, and indeed are starting to buy up whole hospital chains.

Talk about a conflict of interest! Dr. Wes points out that that this will eventually mean the end of independant private practices -- that because of that and the Accountable Care Act doctors will end up working directly for hospitals.

I really like my primary care doc, and trust him to make decisions in my best interest. That's the nice thing about independence, right? I don't know how much I'll trust him if he's working directly for the insurance company.

More important, however, is that this further increases the power that bureaucrats have over our healthcare decisions. They already have a financial motivation to deny us care; how much more will they have once they own the hospital too?

Then again, isn't denial of care that the whole purpose of Obamacare?




¹ No blowjob jokes, ok?

Yeah, What He Said

I had hoped to avoid posts that merely link to another's blog post, but man, I can't improve on Mark Randazza's takedown of shrieking harpy Jessica Valenti. Randazza, if you didn't know, is one of the most prominent First Amendment attorneys in the country.

In short, Jessica the C-Word Valenti doesn't like the fact that there's a site like Register-Her.com is allowed to exist. Register-her.com is a wiki that documents wrongs such as murder, false rape accusations, and pedophilia, and I guess we're not allowed to point out that women can be as evil as men. Men's rights? Phsaw.

Anyhow, RTWT