It’s Friday, June 3rd, 2022…and for those wondering what career they should have pursued, wonder no longer, as these items from the Nickel and George Lawlor respectively clearly indicate either a lifeguard…
The first, though in our opinion utterly unjustifiable, is the result of massive amounts of overtime. As for the second, two thoughts immediately come to mind: (1). What could the superintendent of a school district comprised of eight elementary schools POSSIBLY DO to MERIT $1.7 million in additional compensation over and above her $189,000 annual salary?!?; and, (2). This is what happens when your federal tax dollars are allocated without any checks or balances as to how they’re spent.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, in a must-read commentary we feel deserves to be featured in full, NRO‘s Charlie Cooke urges opponents of the 2nd Amendment to at least…
“If it will please the court, I will happily fall onto both my knees, throw my arms up into the air, shake my head plaintively, and plead with America’s journalists, in the name of all that is good and right, to stop doing this:
The interpretation that the Second Amendment extends to individuals’ rights to own guns only became mainstream in 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark gun case, District of Columbia vs. Heller, that Americans have a constitutional right to own guns in their homes, knocking down the District’s handgun ban.
This claim was made yesterday in the Washington Post, by a staff writer named Amber Phillips, under the tag “Analysis.” It is, of course, a ridiculous, contemptuous, malicious lie, a myth, or, if you prefer to use a phrase that has become popular of late, disinformation. It has never — at any point in the history of the United States — been “mainstream” to interpret the Second Amendment as anything other than a protection of “individuals’ rights to own guns.” The decision in Heller was, indeed, “landmark.” But it was so only because it represented the first time that the Supreme Court had been asked a direct question about the meaning of the amendment that, for more than two centuries up to then, had not needed to be asked.
Three months before Heller was decided, 73 percent of Americans believed that “the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the rights of Americans to own guns,” with just 20 percent contending that it “only guarantees members of state militias such as National Guard units the right to own guns.” That 73 percent supermajority (we might call it the “mainstream”) included a majority of non-gun-owners — which, well, of course it did, given that the alternative interpretation represents a preposterous conspiracy theory. To be within that 20 percent minority, one must ignore all of the history before the Second Amendment’s passage; all of the contemporary commentary as to its meaning; James Madison’s intention to insert it into the Constitution next to the other individual rights in Article I, Section 9, rather than next to the militia clause in Article I, Section 8, clause 16; the 45 state-level rights to keep and bear arms, many of which predated the Second Amendment; the meaning of “the people” everywhere else in the Bill of Rights; the fact that it would make no sense at all to give an individual a “right” to join a state-run institution from which the federal government could bar him; and all evidence of what the United States was actually like prior to 2008.
Writing in 1989, the progressive law professor Sanford Levinson explained in the Yale Law Journal that the theory that Amber Phillips is now laundering “is derived from a mixture of sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, perhaps even ‘winning,’ interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation.” Or, as Adam Liptak put it in the New York Times in 2007, the theory that Phillips has shared is based on “received wisdom and political preferences rather than a serious consideration of the amendment’s text, history and place in the structure of the Constitution.” Once one undertakes that “serious consideration,” one recognizes immediately that the “collective right” claim is, and always has been, a cynical, dishonest, outcome-driven farce. There is a good reason why even Barack Obama responded to the Heller decision by confirming that he had “always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms”: The alternative is a joke.
Phillips’s attempt to rewrite history isn’t new, of course. Back in 2000, the historian — “historian” — Michael Bellesiles wrote a ridiculous book called Arming America, in which he claimed that American “gun culture” was invented in the mid 19th century, and that prior to that, gun ownership in the United States had been rare. For this contribution to the canon, Bellesiles won the Bancroft Prize . . . and then lost it, after his argument was exposed as a ridiculous fraud. Clayton Cramer, one of the men who brought the hoax to light, noted that the reason so many “historians” had “swallowed Arming America’s preposterous claims so readily is that it fit into their political worldview so well. . . . Arming America said things, and created a system of thought so comfortable for the vast majority of historians, that they didn’t even pause to consider the possibility that something wasn’t right.” (For the same reason the FBI eagerly swallowed Hillary’s Russia-collusion narrative hook, line and sinker!)
Neither, it seems, has Amber Phillips. “How did we get here?” she asks, before proposing that “historians attribute it to a relatively recent political push by gun rights groups to reinterpret the Constitution” and blaming the “appointment of judges and funding of scholars who would interpret the Second Amendment more broadly.” One must ask to what Phillips’s “relatively recently” modifier applies? Does it pertain to the 1982 Senate report that concluded that it was “inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner”? Is that when this started? If not, how about in 1960, when Hubert Humphrey — the man who invented the Peace Corps and Medicare, and was a tireless opponent of nuclear-weapons testing — insisted casually that “one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms,” and submitted that “the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible”?
Perhaps Phillips’s “gun rights groups” went back in time a little earlier, to 1880, when the most famous legal scholar of the era, Thomas Cooley, observed that the meaning of the Second Amendment was “that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose”? Or to 1868, when, during the debate over the 14th Amendment, Senator Jacob Howard listed the “right to keep and bear arms” among the “privileges and immunities” that would now be extended to freed blacks? Perhaps they helped draft the 1857Dred Scott decision, in which the disgraceful Justice Taney warned that if black Americans were to be regarded as citizens, they would enjoy “the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went”?
Am I still underestimating it? Did this dastardly plot to read the English language plainly start even earlier? Was St. George Tucker on the Federalist Society payroll when he wrote in 1803 that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; . . . and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government”? Did it begin in 1791, when Representative Roger Sherman described the Second Amendment as protecting “the privilege of every citizen, and one of his most essential rights, to bear arms, and to resist every attack upon his liberty or property, by whomsoever made”? Or 1789, when the Philadelphia lawyer Tench Coxe observed of the unamended Constitution that “the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people,” and of the Second Amendment specifically that “the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms”? Surely, the scheme cannot have reached as far back as 1776, 15 years before the Second Amendment was ratified and 232 years before Heller, when Pennsylvania became the first state to affirm in law that “the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state”?
I could go on, but I won’t, because it’s not necessary. Instead, I will reiterate my plea to the press: Please, stop it. You’re not fooling the American public. You’re not fooling the courts. You’re just making fools of yourselves, and of the handful of motivated reasoners whom you’re misinforming. Democracy, Darkness — you know the rest.“
“…I don’t believe our mass shooting problem is first and foremost a mental health problem,” said Murphy. “We have no more mental illness in the United States than any other nation. It’s just in this country if you’re having homicidal thoughts, you can easily get your hands on a weapon of mass destruction as opposed to every other high-income nation in the world.“
So, according to Murphy, mental illness isn’t the problem; Rather the issue is homicidal thoughts…which we guess in Murphyworld are sane and normal…combined with the availability of AR-15s, which are, again, in Murphyworld, now weapons of mass destruction.
How then, would Murphy explain the fact Switzerland, which requires every able-bodied male of military age to keep a fully-automatic rifle in their possession, hasn’t experienced a mass shooting since 2001? And that by a gunman not of sound mind!
As Kevin Williamson noted in this past Wednesday’s edition, Progressives KNOW how to mitigate the problem, they just aren’t interested in doing so. It’s like the Arab world and the “Palestinian refugees”, none of whom were ever forced from Israel: The Arabs certainly have the room and resources to relocate every single supposed refugee, but their continued suffering serves a political purpose, just like the victims of American gun violence.
“…As I have argued before, the Democrats’ position vis-à-vis firearms is not a matter of ballistics but one of aesthetics. There isn’t anything especially dangerous about the 5.56mm semi-automatic rifles that give suburban progressives the willies. They fire a round that is less powerful than that of a typical deer rifle, and they have the same rate of fire — one round for one pull of the trigger — as a revolver and most other common firearms. They can be fitted with magazines that hold 30 rounds — or 50 rounds, or 100 rounds — but that is true of any firearm with a detachable box magazine, which is a feature of the great majority of modern rifles and handguns. You can tell that this is a matter of aesthetics from the fact that the old 1990s ban on so-called assault weapons took a largely aesthetic approach — among other things, it put firearms on the naughty list merely for having a lug on which to mount a bayonet. The 1990s were pretty wild, but there weren’t a lot of bayonet murders. Folding stocks and bayonet lugs didn’t have any practical effect on crime in the 1990s; they just offended some refined progressive sensibilities.
President Biden fixates on the 9mm handgun, and he also says that all you need to defend yourself and your family is a shotgun. A shotgun is very effective for that purpose, because a single shot from a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with 00 (“double aught”) buckshot inflicts damage equivalent to being shot nine times with a 9mm handgun. President Biden’s position is, in short, “You shouldn’t have that dangerous weapon, because it is dangerous, and instead, you should have this much more dangerous weapon.” It is incoherent, but Joe Biden has always been incoherent — this is not exclusively an effect of his senescence.
Bans on this or that common firearm are nonstarters politically and dead-on-arrival constitutionally. They shouldn’t really even be part of the conversation.
What is on the table are “time and place” regulations, which are a good deal less controversial and which can — and should — be managed at the local level. The Second Amendment protects a fundamental right to keep and bear arms, and that fundamental right belongs to every American irrespective of his place of residence. But we federalists appreciate that even the fundamental rights may be implemented with some variation among and within the states. There isn’t any reason that the local gun regulations in Manhattan have to be identical to those in Brewster County, Texas, or Niobrara County, Wyo. The same principle under which we exclude carrying firearms onto commercial flights might as easily apply to city subways, nightlife districts such as the French Quarter or Sixth Street, etc. Indeed, even in gun-friendly states such as Texas, there are many places where a firearm may not be carried, some of them determined by legislation and some of them privately determined under Texas’s firearms-trespass law, which has the fortuitous statutory designation of Section 30.06 (“thirty aught six”).
There may be room for prudent changes to time-and-place restrictions, but these are not going to have much effect on either ordinary violent crime or homicidal spectaculars such as the ones recently carried out in Buffalo and Uvalde…”
Why? Because criminals, by definition…
…DON’T OBEY THE LAW!!! And that includes any ban on bringing weapons on school property.
“The next president should not be in his seventies . . . or his eighties.
I realize that is age-ist, but the presidency is one of the hardest jobs in the world, and executing the duties of the presidency well requires someone who is in good physical and mental health, ideally with a lot of vigor and an ability to handle off-the-charts stress and a relentless workload.
Joe Biden was not the most verbally or mentally disciplined guy back when he was vice president, and his advancing age is worsening his problems. The president really can’t speak off-script anymore without blurting out something that undermines the case he was trying to make. Republicans may not mind having a president who is so ineffective, but over the long term, it isn’t good for the country to have a commander in chief who can’t handle portions of the job.
…Speaking of septuagenarians who want to be victorious on Election Night in November 2024, Donald Trump is now contending that “something stinks in Georgia” and that Brian Kemp’s victory in the GOP gubernatorial primary is not legitimate. Trump links to a conspiratorial rant by Emerald Robinson. It is the ultimate proof that Trump does not base his claims of election fraud on facts or evidence, but it is his knee-jerk excuse for any election that doesn’t go his way. (Recall that in February 2016, after Ted Cruz won the Iowa Caucuses, Trump tweeted, “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he illegally stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong any [sic] why he got more votes than anticipated. Bad!”
The country has real problems, and it will still have real problems on January 20, 2025. This is why the country needs a real president, and not an old man having mood swings and making excuses.“
Case in point, courtesy of the Morning Jolt, second item in the column.
Here’s the juice: On his brightest day, Biden was still a pretty dim bulb, and time has only further lessened his mental luminescence. He’s not only far too old, but far too stupid. Seriously, presidential candidates should have to pass a college-level general knowledge and history test. That would keep both Biden and Trump on the sidelines in 2024; Probably Kommielaa and Moochie as well.
Moving on, courtesy of George Lawlor, the Washington Examiner reports…
“The Congressional Budget Office has just confirmed that President Joe Biden is blameworthy for the record-high inflation that is punishing workers. Further, this nonpartisan source says that Biden’s preferred fix, raising taxes, will only make the economy worse.
Like Summers and Furman, the CBO noted that the stimulus checks sent to every family significantly boosted demand, causing inflationary pressure on its own.
By paying workers not to work, Biden’s COVID stimulus artificially “slowed the recovery of labor force participation.” As noted by Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, this lack of workers strained supply chains, thus providing a second source of upward pressure on prices.
The CBO predicts that this Biden-caused inflation will persist into next year, tempered only by the Federal Reserve’s willingness to raise interest rates, which will, in turn, cause the economy to slow or even contract…”
Hells bells, as the incomparable Michael Ramirez illustrates, even Janet Yellen…
Also, Dr. Faux Chi confirms we were right when we observed in the Wednesday edition this wasn’t about reimposing the mask mandate, but rather to reserve the unconstitutional measure for future employment. Saaayy…later this fall…prior to the mid-terms.
“A former Virginia Tech football player was acquitted of murder charges Friday in the deadly beating of a man accused of pretending to be a woman during a sexual encounter after the two matched on Tinder. A jury in Montgomery County Circuit Court found 19-year-old Isimemen Etute not guilty of a charge of second-degree murder in the 2021 death of Jerry Smith, 40, of Blacksburg.
…Smith performed oral sex on Etute, who later returned to the apartment to find out if his date was a man or a woman. In taking the stand earlier in the week, Etute had testified that he felt “violated” when he discovered that the Tinder match he believed to be a woman was actually a man. Etute had testified that Smith reached for what Etute thought was a gun. Smith did not own a gun, but police reported finding a knife between the man’s mattress and box spring…”
In other words…
A couple of thoughts come to mind: First, while not in any way suggesting…
…or condoning the beating he handed out, we can certainly understand his response, and frankly don’t believe he intended to kill the deceased. Second, Mr. Etute should be thankful he was tried in Montgomery County, VA rather than Montgomery County, MD, where a jury would not only have likely convicted him of murder, but found him guilty of a hate crime to boot.
Magoo
Video of the Day
Wow! All we can say is, “Wow”! Ronaldus Maximus at his best.
Tales of The Darkside
Charlie Kirk attacks a contemporary problem from a Christian perspective.
On the Lighter Side
Courtesy of Rick Page, Captain James Tiberius Kirk and the crew of NC-1701 encounter an enigma from Earth’s distant past.
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