Arguing About Definitions

We seem to be arguing about definitions lately, which is usually a waste of time. Many English words have more than one definition, so what matters is what you mean when you say that word. In general, a militia is a part time citizen army. The militias to which the Second Amendment refers were sponsored by the states, and the colonies before that. The militias that were running around the woods a few years ago were not sponsored by any state, so they were not the same thing. The National Guard now does the work that the state militias used to do, and also some other things. This means that a state militia would now be redundant, but I still would like Michigan to have one in case you city slickers get the notion that you can come up to God's country and run rough shod over us.

I seem to remember that we looked up "yeoman" before, and it also had more than one definition. The Midieval yeomen to which I have been referring were independent landowners who lived outside the feudal system of lords, vassals, and serfs.

The "dry guys" must have believed that the constitution did not allow for Prohibition because they thought it necessary to pass the Sixteenth Amendment to make it legal. The drinkers must have opposed that amendment, and refused to honor it once it had been passed. I doubt that Prohibition caused many drinkers to give up drinking, and it may have inspired people who didn't drink before to take it up. You know, the old "forbidden fruit" thing.

I already told you how gun ownership makes the world a better place, it enables people to hunt, and to defend themselves and others against criminal attack, should the need arise. Truth be known, very few gun owners will ever need to use their guns for defense, but it makes them feel good to think that they can if they have to.

 Like I said before, I don't mind getting my hands dirty doing something that I want to do, but I'm not interested in doing something that I don't want to do, whether or not my hands get dirty in the process. If I wanted to be "where the action is" I wouldn't be holed up in the swamps of Northern Michigan. I am currently getting all the action I want just plowing snow and shoving wood into the furnace. As a matter of fact, with the winter we are having, I could do with a little less action! Where is global warming when you need it?

I have not read all those weapons laws, but I thought it was common knowledge that civilians were not allowed to possess certain military weapons like machine guns and bazookas. Are you disputing that?

Funny that you should say my guys are in control, I thought that your guys took over this country back in the 60s and my guys have been trying to take it back ever since. It's true that gun control seems to be a hard sell lately. Maybe that's because there are already plenty of gun laws on the books. Maybe it's just because people don't like Obama anymore. It's not unusual for a president to become unpopular during his second term.

One thing for sure, if my guys were in control of this country, we wouldn't be having all this foolishness about gay marriage. I recently read an opinion piece in our paper that said gay marriage can't do traditional marriage any harm because traditional marriage went down the tubes a long time ago. About half the married people in this country end up divorced, and the other half wish that they were. Maybe they have a point there, but that still doesn't mean I have to vote for it.

Theory vs practice

I believe what the militias in Illinois did was fight injuns. I don’t think the National Guard does that. I believe that back in the day if a militia guy didn’t want to join in on a particular raid he would tell the rest of the guys to go fuck themselves. I don’t believe that option is open to a member of the present day National Guard. I believe the closest thing we have had to a militia in the present day is those black helicopter guys who used to roam the forests of your state, but now I think their wives let them drink beer in the house so we don’t hear about them anymore.

Yeah I think all of us states should have their own armies too. Then the Fighting Illini could march into Wisconsin and the upper peninsula and then the lower and make you guys pay tribute and that could solve our budget deficit.

I think a yeoman was pretty much a vassal, a step above a serf, but that was it. Read your wiki.

I wasn’t there when prohibition began, but I don’t believe the wets ever used the argument that the constitution protected their right to drink. At least they were more honest then you gun nuts.

See here’s the thing, if you believe that hauling Old Betsy around makes it a better world, than make that argument. Don’t make some constitutional argument when you admit that you will be packing heat regardless of what the constitution says, so the constitution is irrelevant to the argument.

My theory vs practice thing is like the founding fathers drew up the constitution, dividing up the government and putting in all those checks and balances. That is theory. Then they put people in the positions they had invented and those guys used it to fight for whatever they wanted and sometimes they went along with the constitution when it was to their advantage, and sometimes they found loopholes, and sometimes they downright cheated. That is practice.

Ideology is theory and the politicians are the practice, and I think if you are only interested in ideology to the exclusion of the politicians you are outside Plato’s cave where all the action is.

You know I am the kind of guy who believes there are two kinds of people in the world, and I think there are two kinds of philosophy also. There are the stoics who believe the world is corrupt and there’s not much to be done about that, so the thing to do is keep yourself morally straight and the hell with everybody else. And then there are the utilitarians who believe you should fight to make it a better world, and if in the struggle you might have to cozy up to some dirty guys and soil your tunic, then so it goes.

The better world to the utilitarian is the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. And you are absolutely right that the big problem with this is who decides what the greatest good is.

I wonder about these laws against bazookas and atom bombs. Surely they aren’t just laws that say here are the weapons that you cannot have. It is never good to have a list of weapons because you gun nuts always find some loophole. I guess that it is more of a general law and the forbidden weapons come from the interpretation of the law. I guess you would know exactly what that law is.

See that’s where my anti gun nuts come a cropper, is it a an assault weapon, is it a tactical weapon, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

Myself, I would leave you Old Betsy, but I would take away all the automatic weapons and I would be pretty strict about who could own a handgun. But you know that is theory, in practice you gun nuts occupy the seat of power, and there is nothing to be done about it until people change their minds about it.

I don’t know what you mean by the recent controversy that has made guns fly off the shelf. I guess you mean the election of Barak Obama. And indeed you are right they have been flying. Obama has done nothing to curb guns in six years on the job, but gun nuts are so stupid that they think they have to fill their closets before the spigot shuts off. You guys are in control, that spigot is not going to be turned off in the foreseeable future, but go ahead, do as you like, it’s your money.

But how about gay marriage? I remember you saying that if we allowed gay marriage it would damage your marriage, so now that is legal for roughly half (maybe a third) of the people in the country what damage has you marriage suffered?

Potato - Potatoh

I'm not making this up, ask anybody who knows about this stuff and they will tell you that the National Guard now fills the role that used to be played by the state militias. Personally, I'd rather they had stuck with the militias, but the transition happened before I was born and I was not consulted. My problem with the National guard is that it's too damn national. The militias were primarily a state army although, since they could be called into national service, I suppose it doesn't make that much difference. I just like the idea of each state having its own army.

The Founding Fathers didn't say anything about the anti-gun people because there weren't any anti-gun people in those days. There were the Quakers, but they were generally anti-war, not specifically anti-gun. I think they would have been against any war, even if it was fought with swords or pitchforks, but I don't think they wanted the government to confiscate all the guns, swords, and pitchforks.

There were no condos in Jefferson's time either, but I think you're right that being a yeoman had more to do with owning agricultural land than it did with home ownership. In those days the majority of people were farmers, and the difference between a yeoman and a peasant was that a yeoman owned the land that he worked on, while the peasants were tenant farmers. An aristocrat owned land and had other people to work it for him, while the yeomen were basically family farmers. I think that being a yeoman had more to it than that, though. The peasants owed allegiance to their landlord, and most aristocrats owed allegiance to another aristocrat. The yeoman might have owed allegiance to the king or emperor but, other than that, he was his own boss. A yeoman might hire himself out to an aristocrat, like a contractor, but he was under no obligation to do so.

I agree with you that we gun nuts only use the constitution to reinforce our position. If the constitution was legally amended to prohibit gun ownership, we probably wouldn't support it any more than the drinkers supported the Prohibition Amendment.

As far as that "rule of law v rule of men" thing goes, I think you've summed it up pretty well. We have the rule of law, but the laws are made and administered by men, or persons to be more politically correct. The only difference is that, if we didn't have the rule of law at all, the person in charge could do anything they wanted to, and there would be no way to hold them accountable.

I've been meaning to ask you something about the "theory v practice thing". If the theory is that you do the greatest good for the greatest number, how do you determine what is the greatest good for the greatest number? Different people want different things, and they don't always want what's good for them, or what you or I think is good for them. Majority rule is better than nothing, but it's far from perfect. If 51% of the people are in favor or your proposal, that means that 49% are opposed to it. If the minority is sufficiently opposed, the majority is going to have a hard time cramming it down their throats.

We already have laws that prohibit civilians from possessing machine guns, bazookas, and atomic bombs. These laws have been on the books for a long time, and most people don't have a problem with them. The controversy arises over the so-called "assault rifles", which we gun nuts prefer to call "tactical rifles". They were originally developed for the military, but modified versions have become quite popular in the sporting world. Indeed, the recent controversy has made tactical rifles more popular than ever, since Obama was first elected they have been flying off the shelves. There are so many of them out there now, I think you would have a hard time stuffing that cat back into the bag.

Like moths to a flame, here we are again

Well you say potato and I say potatoh. There may be some similarities between the militias and the national guard, but I think the difference between a volunteer and a paid employee is a huge difference. Not that any of this matters because neither of us believes the second amendment has anything to do with taking away your big iron. But then our whole relationship, well most of it, is based on arguing isn’t it? So along those lines you would think the founding fathers would just have said we should make no law forbidding fire arms, if that’s what they meant to say, and left out that phrase about militias preceding it. You would have thought that they, in their wisdom, would have known this phrase would be sort of a loophole a couple hundred years down the pike for anti gun nuts, and left it out. So then the intent of the second amendment is dependent on the definition of militias then and now, and if you ask me they are like the difference between a cat and a dog, both eat and crap, but they are distinctly different animals.

Actually I own my condo, but I don’t know if Thomas Jefferson would consider me a yeoman. I think back then if you were a landowner you owned your house and the land around it so that you could grow stuff to support yourself. I guess those who lived in cities would own just a house, but not many lived in cities back then, but the idea of a freehold twenty one stories in the air would not be something Thomas Jefferson would have in mind.

Well so you say, maybe the second doesn’t help you case but the ninth does, and if not that then the fifth, and I think you just want to own your gun, and you are searching through the constitution to find something to justify it. I think that is a little like those guys who have some belief and go through the bible and find verses to back it up. Or course their opponents can do the same and come up with verses to prove the opposite, and the next thing you know they are arguing about whether Jeremiah or Isaac is the bigger asshole.

How about this thought experiment? How about us anti gun nuts all get together and slip something in all your gun nuts’ beer and while you guys are asleep, we pass an amendment to outlaw all firearms. And when you guys wake up there it is in the constitution with all the other amendments. Do you guys all line up and turn in your firearms because you are all such true believers in the constitution? Somehow I don’t think you would.

I didn’t mean to challenge you about how gun ownership makes it a better world. We have agreed on rare occasions, and we have disagreed calmly sometimes, and sometimes with a bit of anger, but never has it become so heated as when we discussed guns. That’s the way I remember it.

But I knew I was treading on dangerous territory when I brought up the second amendment. I don’t remember anymore but I think I brought it up in context of do we live by the rule of law or of man, which had something to do with theory vs practice, about which I believe I meant to make a point, which I still may, if I ever remember what it was.

I have no problem with you and Old Betsy. A happy Beaglesonia is a beacon to the nation of how this great nation embraces freeholders in the swamp and in the sky.

The only thing, the only little thing is that I think maybe some weapons are so powerful that they should not be allowed, and maybe we shouldn’t let every Tom, Dick, and Harry own as many as they like. When I say this I think I am making a reasonable proposal, but what I think you think is that I am reaching to tear Old Betsy out of your loving arms.

A Better World

The National Guard of today is not exactly the same as the militias of yore, but it is generally considered to be the successor to those militias. If the early militias were unpaid it was probably because the states didn't have the money to pay them. The colonies had militias, mostly to defend against Indian attacks, before they ever thought of using them against the King of England. The Second Amendment guaranteed that the newly formed U.S. government would not deprive the states of this traditional means of defending themselves. Article II, Section 2, Paragraph 1 gives the president the power to call the militias into national service when needed, just like he calls the National Guard into service today. When either the militias or the Guard are not employed in national service, which is most of the time, they remain under the jurisdiction of their own state governments.

If you have to be a landowner to be a yeoman, then I certainly qualify. You, being a renter, probably do not. That doesn't make you any less of an American than I am, so I guess you have pretty well demolished my "yeoman" argument concerning the right to bear arms. I guess we agree that the right of private citizens to own guns doesn't come from the Second Amendment either, but that still leaves the Ninth Amendment with its reference to other rights "retained by the people". When you think about it, the only rights anybody really has are the ones he is willing to assert. The constitution doesn't grant you any rights, it just guarantees that the government won't interfere with your exercise of them. Then there's the Fifth Amendment, which states that no person shall be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law;". This statement seems to go against the whole concept of "rights", which makes me wonder why the constitution bothers to mention them in the first place.

I think that Jefferson's concept of a nation of yeomen was a utopian vision of the future. The culture in which he was born and raised certainly wasn't like that. He inherited his land, and the slaves that came with it. The slaves were something like the peasants of Europe, and Jefferson was more like an aristocrat than a yeoman. He talked about freeing his slaves, but he never did it. Maybe he couldn't figure out how to run his farm without them, or maybe he didn't know what would become of them if he turned them loose. What he could have done was free them on paper, and then offer them all jobs doing the same work they were already doing. Chances are that most of them would have stayed on because they had no place else to go. Too bad somebody didn't think of that back in those days, the whole Civil War could have been avoided.

We started discussing guns (this time) because you said that you wanted to talk about the Second Amendment. Now you have challenged me to explain how gun ownership makes this a better world. Okay, shifting gears now: Although I would not hesitate to use my guns in defense of myself or another person, I have thankfully never had to do that, and that's not the primary reason I own them. The main reason I have guns is for sporting purposes, hunting and target shooting. This makes my personal world better because I like to do those things. Other people like to play baseball and football, and those sports make their world better. If they weren't doing that, who knows what sort of mischief they might get into with their spare time and energy? People who use guns for defense are certainly better off than if they meekly surrendered their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, to the depredations of murderers and rapists. Of course, murderers and rapists can use guns too, which is all the more reason why decent people need them. Perhaps we should expand on this theme, since we have pretty well run the constitution discussion into the ground.

words, words, words

Damn you Beagles, you made me go to the damn wiki. I remember reading some time ago that there isn’t much similarity between the militias of yore and the national guard of today, but I had forgotten the details of that so I went to the wiki, and it seems like part of the definition of a militia, back in the day, is of an unpaid force, which the national guard decidedly is not.

I did use ‘if’ instead of ‘since’ because I thought it would make my case more clear. It seemed to me that in this case the use of ‘since’ was similar to ‘if’. Since the weather is warm, we will go swimming implies that if the weather is cold we will not go swimming.

Words, words, words, that’s the problem with words. To you militia and the national guard are the same thing, to me they are distinctly different entities. The construction of ‘since’ in that sentence looks the same as ‘if’ to me, but not to you.

And yeoman, I looked up yeoman while I was on wiki, and it says that a yeoman was a property holder, and it was certainly a class thing since they were better than the landless, so does that mean renters aren’t part of the republic?

And I wouldn’t put a nickel on anything old Tom Jeff had to say. He was opposed to slavery, but he kept his. He was opposed to factories, but he built one on his farms. He was all for independent freeholders, but he was always neck deep in debt. He did have the power to stir men’s souls, but I don’t think that is necessarily a good thing. There’s been a lot of guys coming down the pike who stirred our souls and for the most part, we have ended up worse off for their passage.

Anyway it’s not like you are going to turn in Old Betsy if the gummint does away with the national guard, or if the supremes rule that that ‘since’ is really an ‘if.’ In fact you don’t look to the second amendment to justify your firearm at all. Seems like a wise move to me.

Seems to me if you think that your having your gun makes it a better world, you should stick to the reasons of why that makes for a better world (I think we should all work for a better world, no really, it’s the altruist in me.). Seems kind of foolish to say because the constitution says so, since some other guy can just as validly say I don’t think the constitution says so, and then you are arguing about what you both think the constitution says rather than whether it is a good idea to let Beagles walk around with the big iron. And then it really doesn’t matter what either of you guys think the constitution means, because some guy in a black robe will decide that.

If a law is constitutional until it is declared unconstitutional then it has like a time stamp on it. It was constitutional at 11:40 AM Feb 26th 2014, but after that it is unconstitional, and after 12:22 PM Feb 28th 2024 it will be constitutional again.

But what am I trying to say here? I’m not saying the constitution is a scrap of paper. Actually I think I already said that, but I was being a little showboaty, the way I sometimes get. The constitution is like this plan that we all agree to, like the rules for chess, this is how the game is played, and we all play fair, and I think this is what keeps us from manning the barricades and shooting at each other, which I think is a good thing.

But I think some people (on both sides) want to have some kind of law, say to make it illegal to smoke pot, and they look up their pocket copy and they find some phrase in it that they think supports their case, and now suddenly they are not simply advocating making pot legal, they are Defending the Constitution, and their chests puff out because now they are engaged in a noble cause. And then we are discussing the meaning of some phrase written down over two hundred years ago instead of whether or not legalizing pot will make it a better world.

You Got it All Backwards

We do so have state militias, although now they are called "The National Guard". Since the beginning, there has been  provision for the militias to be called into national service when needed (Article II, Section 2). When they are not so engaged, they are under the control of their own state governor. It has only been the last decade or so that the National Guard has been extensively deployed overseas. Before that they stayed in their home states most of the time.

Your interpretation of the wording in the Second Amendment is unique. It's not "if", it's "since" a militia is necessary. Look at it again, paying attention to the punctuation, and I think you'll see what I mean.

The power of the Supreme Court to declare a law unconstitutional may be inferred in Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 2, although it doesn't say that exactly. I believe it was John Marshall, one of the first Chief Justices, who established that precedent. Congress has the power to limit the authority of the courts (same reference) but, for some reason, almost never does. All congressmen and the president take an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution" (Article II, Section 1, Paragraph 10) so, theoretically, any one of them could declare a law to be unconstitutional. The potential conflicts that would arise from all those people trying to exercising that authority at once may be one reason why the Supremes ended up with the job. Anyway, the Supremes don't rule on the constitutionality of every law that is passed. Somebody has to take legal action to bring it up for their consideration. If nobody ever challenges the constitutionality of a law, the Supremes will never get to rule on it, and the law, having never been proven otherwise, will be considered to be constitutional. So it's constitutional until they say it isn't, not the other way around.

The case to which I referred was in the news a few years ago. This guy in New York City applied for a handgun permit, which he said he needed for his job as a private security guard. The city denied his request, basically saying that nobody in New York but the police should be allowed to carry a handgun. The Supremes ruled that the city could regulate firearms, but that they couldn't issue a blanket prohibition of their ownership, citing the Second Amendment. I believe it was back in the 1930s that a previous Supreme Court had ruled that the Second Amendment applied only to state militias and had nothing to do with private gun ownership. This latest ruling effectively reversed that position.

Okay, that whole thing about the yeomen was my own creative interpretation of the historical right to bear arms. Nevertheless, at the time the constitution was written, the right to private gun ownership had never been challenged in the U.S.,either under the Articles of Confederation or during the British colonial period. I don't think it's too much of a stretch, then, to categorize it as a traditional right that was "retained by the people" as described in the Ninth Amendment.

I'm pretty sure that Thomas Jefferson said that the U.S. should be a nation of yeomen. Truth be known, I'm not so sure about the rest of them. A European style class system was never encoded in U.S. law, although many Americans seem to voluntarily divide themselves into vaguely defined socio-economic classes. I figure that, if other people can arbitrarily decide what class they belong to, then so can I, and I decided a long time ago that I wanted to be a yeoman when I grew up.

nothing is constitutional until the supremes decide it is

I think what is popular with the gun nuts about the second amendment, is basically that it is an amendment, part of the constitution, and therefore beyond reproach, something that really is beyond discussion, to criticize it is to criticize the ordained founding fathers, so you must be some kind of traitor to be agin it, so why doncha tell it to Od Betsy here.

Oh you know how you gun nuts are, always calling your weapons Old Betsy, or Mr Smith and Mr Wesson, colorful guys the whole lot of you.

But what, you don’t go with the second amendment thing? What a heretic. Myself I always thought that was weak. It always seemed to me, like I think you are saying, that it’s saying something like, IF a well regulated militia is required THEN the right to firearms should not be infringed. So if the first premise is false (a militia doesn’t appear to be required, and in any case we don’t have those anymore, except for those black helicopter guys who seem to have gotten lost in the forest and starved to death years ago), then the second is voided, and thus the right to bear firearms can be infringed. Not that it has to be, just that it can be.

I’m not familiar with this most recent Supreme Court decision.

It happens all the time where your or my side wants to pass a law and then the other side declares that it is unconstitutional, and then the two argue over whether it is constitutional or not, and the fact is neither side really knows whether it is or not until it goes up before the supremes. And that’s a little odd because maybe it would have gone one way except that before it gets to the court one of the supremes dies or quits, and a guy who thinks differently takes his place and so it goes the other way.

Well so it goes. This is the law of the land. I believe the founding fathers wrote into the constitution that the supremes would decide what was constitutional.

It always seemed a little odd to me, that people like you and me howl about whether this or that is constitutional or not, and we’re not even lawyers, so how the hell do we know? And even if we were lawyers, we’re not supremes, and even if we were supremes, we wouldn’t know what the law of the land was until we knew how the other guys were voting.

I think mad king George never had an issue with colonists toting firearms because there was not a lot he could do about it. I don’t believe he allowed his subjects in merrie olde Englande to do the same.

This yeoman thing seems pretty far fetched to me. I’ve never come across anything about the founding fathers thinking we should all be yeoman, especially since we didn’t even have a damn king for them to be in the service of.

Anyway I don’t think you should be going to English common law for your sources. We had no love for the English when we wrote this thing, and much of it was written to make sure the new government didn’t treat us like the Brits treated us. Ever wonder about that thing where you can’t force people to board your soldiers? Who the hell would do that? I think the constitution was written in a time when we weren’t sure if the British were coming back again, so we thought a little differently than we do now. Does that mean that they thought differently then and so we should interpret it in the light of the present day? I think so.

The Right to Arm Bears

I didn't make that up, I read it somewhere a long time ago, I think it was in Mad magazine. It went with a cartoon picture of a vicious, evil looking bear standing on its hind legs and shooting people with some kind of firearm. Funny, the things you remember.

There are two ways, well at least two ways, that you can interpret something like the Constitution or the Bible. One way is to try to figure out what was the intent of the author at the time it was written, and the other way is to try to determine what it means to us today. There are things that could be said, both pro and con, about either method.

Second Amendment: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." This doesn't say anything about hunting, target shooting, or keeping firearms for personal protection, it's all about the states' right to maintain militias. The most recent Supreme Court decision of which I am aware extended the right to bear arms into those areas, but previous court decisions did not. I should be happy about the latest ruling, but I'm not really. I think that the earlier interpretations were correct. I think it's unfortunate that my fellow gun nuts have been leaning on the Second Amendment for all these years when a much better argument could have been made using the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

I don't think that the authors of the Second Amendment believed that it was necessary to enumerate the individual's right to own firearms because they had no reason to believe that anybody would try to infringe that right. Firearms ownership had been as common in the Colonies as automobile ownership is today, and the King of England never had a problem with that. It was the stockpiling of weapons to arm the militias that gave him fits. Indeed, the British troops that Paul Revere warned everybody about were on their way to confiscate or destroy just such a stockpile when they were met at Concord Bridge by a bunch of good old boys who were determined to prevent them.

Back in the Middle Ages, peasants were generally not allowed to posses weapons except in the service of the king, but yeomen were. Indeed, the word "yeoman" is derived from the old English word for "bowman". The vision of the Founding Fathers was that all Americans would be yeomen, and that no other class distinctions would be recognized. Since we are all yeomen, we retain the yeomen's right to bear arms that has been recognized under English Common Law for centuries.

The right to bear arms, however, doesn't mean that the use of weapons can't be regulated by the government. As with automobiles, the government has the obligation to regulate their use in the interests of law, order, and public safety, but they aren't allowed to ban them altogether. I think that last Supreme Court decision said something like that, and I generally agree with that part of the ruling. Too bad they had to pin their argument to the Second Amendment, for it's a weak argument that is bound to be overturned someday by another court.

A nation of laws written by man

It’s that Platonic thing again. Somewhere there are ideal triangles and horses, and laws and constitutions, but we are all in Plato’s cave and from there we can only glimpse them dimly. If we could break our chains and get out into the light and find the laws that were clear and logical and not contradictory we could make sure that everybody was treated fairly. But we can’t so this is a nation of laws (written by man).

God was nice enough to write on those tablets for Moses to carry down to the Israelites, but since then hasn’t gone to any great lengths to make it clear what exactly He wants from us, so that is left for dull scholars tracing fingers down the pages of dusty books, and trying to figure out what exactly did He mean by say, not killing, surely there are times when the only thing the enemy understands is force, and not covet my neighbor’s wife, how can I help that when she goes sun bathing in that teeny weeny bikini?

And the thing is, being mere man, we have to use words to write the constitution and words are so slippery and they change over time, and in order not to bore people to death they have to be written pretty generally, and then people disagree on what they mean. Take the second amendment, do you think we have reached the point of calm reasonableness where we could discuss that again?

We can’t let people interpret the laws for themselves, we might just as well have no laws. So we have judges, and in principle they are just weighers of truth, just human scales, put so much bullshit in this cup, so much in the other, see which way the thing bends, but of course they are just men and some of them are pretty bad.

Here in Chicago, the home of good gummint, we vote for our judges, and surely you would think if they are selected by the populace, surely no scoundrel could get onto the bench. But what it is, is a list of like fifty people at the end of the ballot and if you’re Irish you vote for the Irish name, and if you are Polish you vote for the Polish name.

I may be wrong here (but how often does that happen), but it seems like in our youth, the selection of supreme court judges was kind of a routine affair, the president chose some guy who was generally the middle of the road, and the congress approved and life went on.

It seems to me that the big change came with Bork. Naturally conservative icon RR wanted to choose a conservative judge, but sometimes those guys turned out to be liberal once they got on the court, so he chose Bork who was so far right that there was hardly a chance he would ever turn liberal, and this upset the dems and they, well they borked him, and since then it has become a big battle every time there is an opening on the supreme court and the prez doesn’t control both houses. Seems to me that the republicans propose far more extreme candidates then the dems, but be that as it may, the supreme court, the third leg of our gummint, is now run by a throw of the dice, a prez may get to select none or he may get to select many depending on who dies or quits during his reign. And you have to nominate relative unknowns who have no paper trail, and when they are being grilled by congress they act like a crook interrogated by the cops, they don’t have any opinions and don’t know nothing.

You know I really should know more about the supreme court. But it sounds so Goddamn boring. I should find a good book.a

Strict Constructionists vs Loose Constructionists

 The ink was hardly dry on the constitution before this argument got started, and it continues on even unto this day. The strict constructionists believe that the federal government can only do what the constitution says it can do, and the loose constructionists believe that the federal government can do anything that the constitution doesn't say it can't do. To me, the 10th Amendment clearly supports the strict constructionists, but a number of Supreme Court Justices have disagreed with my interpretation over the years. Judges! What do they know?

At the time the 18th amendment was passed, the strict constructionists must have been in power because they believed that, since the constitution did not specifically give the feds the authority to ban alcohol, it was necessary to amend the constitution before they could do it. The amendment itself was not the law, it gave the government the authority to pass the law: "The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." (Section 2) I'm not sure why it was deemed necessary to include the states in this at all since, as you said, Prohibition was almost exclusively enforced by the feds. I am guessing that, when the first drug laws were passed, the loose constructionists must have been in power, but there may be more to it than that.

The constitution gives the feds the authority to regulate interstate commerce, and that has been used to support many an argument over the years. You might think that, if you grow some pot on your balcony and sell it to your next door neighbor, you are not engaging in interstate commerce, but you probably are. Chances are that the seeds, the fertilizer, the pots, the potting soil, or the grow lights came from another state, and that can be construed to qualify your activity as interstate commerce. I think that's a bit of a stretch myself, but those nasty judges trump me again.

The trouble with having judges interpret the law is that, a few years later, a different judge can come along and reverse the previous judicial determination. We are supposed to have the rule of law in this country, not the rule of men but, if men can change the interpretation of the law at will, it seems to be little different than when kings made up the laws as they went along. Then again, what are we supposed to do when the laws are written in language that is incomprehensible to the average person?
Then again, the constitution is written in relatively plain English, and people have been arguing about what it means since the day after it was ratified. I have recently sent away for a book on this very subject, I'll let you know what I find out.

The thing about court room proceedings, is that we only get the highlights from our news sources. There are hours and hours of testimony that never make it to the six o'clock news, probably because it would bore the shit out of the viewers. What we need is for somebody to boil it all down and tell us the important parts that influenced the court's decision, leaving out all the "whereases and whyfors" that would put us to sleep, causing us to miss something relevant. Wiki is usually pretty good about that, so maybe that's where we should go for legal information.

Newspapers are the sturdy sails that drive the stately ship of state

My family got the Trib. It is what made me a young right winger. I wasn’t all that clear on the details, but what was going on was there was this magnificent patriot McCarthy, and all these craven dogs, mostly democrats, were trying to take him down.

Maybe about my junior year I started up with the Sun-Times because it had that nice tabloid format. The Daily News was classy, and there was something called the Herald American which I thought must be an old person’s paper because my grandpa Janovsky read it.

In my college and my dropout years I didn’t read many papers because they were all fascist hate rags. From the early seventies I read that big fat Sun-Times that made your fingers black every morning, and since I came back to Chicago in 87 I have been reading the Trib and the Sun-Times every day. I read almost all the political stuff, most of the local news, try to sneak through the gaudy celebrity section in the middle of the paper without learning too much about Bieber, and then the comics and some of the features.

I can’t imagine the morning without the paper.

I think your dad and his pals came up with the right idea for the paper drive. I remember going door to door for the boy scouts selling first aid kits so we could buy tents for the troop, but it turned out waking up in one of them on a cold morning was no fun at all.

Tsk tsk. All the news you want to read and no more? That sounds unpatriotic. In college and in edukashun skool they taught us that one of the missions of education was because we were a democracy in order to steer the ship of state past the foaming reefs of tyranny we needed an informed electorate. I love the photos in the National Geographic, and sometimes the writing is informative as to historic events, but as current events it just steers a middle of the road course and doesn’t have much depth.

I make fun of that high school civics, but I admit you are more up on it than I am. Let me see if I get this.

Before the 18th amendment the feds had not stepped into the booze area, but once it did, it sounds like all it did was authorize the states to prohibit the manufacture of etc? That sounds like the states could pass laws making it illegal or not as they so chose. But wait, it said that the feds also could pass laws prohibiting it. So was the amendment not enough, did they also have to pass a law? Seems to me it was the feds enforcing the law, certainly the locals here in Chicago did not do much cracking down.

So the 21st amendment repealed the 18th, so it was like the 18th had never been there? I’m going to have to do some wiki searching over the weekend.

I think it was an act that made pot illegal. The same one that made the opiates and cocaine illegal. Doesn’t the government have the power to do that?

I don’t see much happening on the pot legalization question unless some political group thinks it can make hay out of making it an issue. The dems aren’t going to come down on it because so many of us like smoking it. I don’t know why the reps haven’t come down on it. Maybe they don’t want to offend you libertarians, but you would think the religious right would, but maybe since they are having such success in the fight against abortion they don’t want to upset that applecart.

Absolutely liquor is way more dangerous than pot. If we discovered some drug that had the same effect we would ban it straight away.

"All the News That's Fit to Print"

I believe that was once the motto of the New York Times, and maybe it still is. One  of our teachers at Gage Park, I believe it was Fred Sears, brought a copy of that paper in to class one day to show us. That thing must have weighed at least five pounds! Who's got time to read all that? I don't think that anybody reads a whole newspaper like that every day anyway, they just flip through the pages and read the parts that interest them. For some it's the sports, for others it's the financial pages, for others it's the comics. We got the Detroit Free Press once for a year, and we didn't renew it after that because we hardly read any of it.

My parents used to get both the Chicago Sun Times and the Tribune, I think it was mostly so they could make a big contribution to the Cub Scout scrap paper drives. We used to tie it up in bundles and store it in our garage until there was enough to justify renting a truck to haul it to the scrap yard. One time, the money they got for the paper didn't even cover the rental on the truck, so the dads got together and invented the paperless paper drive. Once a month they would gather at the tavern on our block and each throw a dollar in the kitty. It was pure profit for the Cub Scouts because they didn't have to rent the truck or do any work either. Then they would start another kitty to buy drinks with. Meanwhile, the wives gathered around our kitchen table and talked about matters that didn't concern us kids, so we went and hung out in our yard. If it was raining, we could hang out in our garage because it was no longer filled up with bundles of newspapers stacked to the ceiling.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, while I may not read all the news that's fit to print, I read all the news that I want to, and that's good enough for me. It's not like an school assignment, you know. That's what's nice about not going to school, you can read what you want, when you want, and there won't be a test on it afterwards. I think I told you before that I subscribe to National Geographic and read it cover to cover every month. While it's not primarily a news periodical, they often have articles about stuff that's been in the news lately, with more depth and background information than you get from the newspapers or the TV.

I think that you missed the point about Prohibition. The 18th Amendment authorized the federal and state governments to prohibit the "manufacture, sale, or transportation, of intoxicating liquors". A constitutional amendment was necessary to enable this legislation because these governments did not previously have this power. The 21st Amendment repealed this power at the federal level, but allowed the states to continue the ban if they so desired. I don't think that any of them did, but I think that a few states still have "dry" counties within them. I think you will agree that alcohol is just as intoxicating as pot, and most medical sources classify it as a drug. So, while pot is not a liquor, alcoholic liquor is certainly a drug, ergo pot and alcohol should reasonably be included in the same category of substances. My point being that, if a constitutional amendment was necessary to prohibit alcoholic liquor, why wasn't a constitutional amendment required to prohibit pot?

As far as that states rights thing you were talking about: The 10th Amendment says "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." This one has been shot full of loopholes over the years by various court decisions, and there are some of us who believe those court decisions to be in error. Nevertheless, unless a specific loophole can  be identified, it would appear that the feds never did have the power to prohibit pot, except maybe in interstate commerce. We will probably hear more about this issue in the future and, if we do, remember that you heard it first from Talks With Beagles.

just a scrap of paper in Plato's cave

A thin local newspaper, whatever news leaks in between the time you settle into your chair and the weather or stocks prices come up, a little wiki from time to time, no books to speak of and I’ll wager no magazines that aren’t about hunting or ammo, doesn’t sound like much, like looking at the world through squinted eyes.

Squinted eyes though is probably the preferred look of the sentry of the freehold of
Beaglesonia. Keep them gummint snoops out especially when they ask all casual like, “Hey there Old timer, you wouldn’t happen to have any of them old hunting rifles, or AK-47s, or bazookas tucked away somewhere do you?”

You’re right, I don’t believe in anything. The flag is just a piece of cloth, and the constitution was not handed down like the ten commandments, instead hammered out by some guys who didn’t agree on much, maybe twenty years before they put up the first Fort Dearborn, where I look out the window now and there is the London Guaranty Building. No god to wipe the sweat from their brows and guide their eyes out of Plato’s cave into the realm of ideal forms.

Am kind of a Platonist though, sort of believe in ideal forms, mostly just for numbers, numbers exist in some pure form beyond the realm of this icky and imperfect world, that has no points, no lines, no icosahedrons to speak of. But all that talk makes me sound like one of the nuts that writes letters to the editor huh?

Icosahedrons si, the Constitution no. Just the work of guys with dirty hands a long time ago. But you got to give it its due. It’s still here, and so are we. But I think it’s mostly us that gets the credit for that longevity. Give the constitution to some emerging nation and they wouldn’t be able to handle it.

I think the reason they never get around to actually having congress declare war, is that it is too cumbersome, and really unrealistic. Anytime the president wants to go to war all he has to do is start beating the drums and anybody who is against it is a traitor, so you will seldom see more than a handful opposing it. Of course once the war goes bad, they will kind of turn on it, but very slowly, with their fingers to the wind of public opinion, not wanting the guy running against them to accuse them of being traitors, and mostly the wars just fade away when nobody wants to pay for them anymore. So easy to get into a war, so hard to get out of one.

There is a difference between laws and amendments. Once you pass an amendment not to ban liquor (I wonder how that is phrased), you can’t make laws to ban liquor, but you can make laws to ban anything else. Hum, I wonder, if we could first make an amendment to ban something and then another to repeal it, I guess we could just pass an amendment to repeal all the other amendments.   

The Constitution is Not Crap!

Our local newspaper is pretty small compared to the papers you get in Chicago. There's usually only about a dozen pages, and at least half of that is sports, which I don't read. There is a lot of local yokel stuff, which I usually just scan over because most of it doesn't concern me. There is only a page or two of national and international news that comes from the AP, and there is one editorial page that features a different columnist each day. Some of them are local guys and some are syndicated from somewhere or other. There are some lefties and some righties, but none of them are as extreme as the guys you have been telling me about. The only nut jobs are found in the "letter to the editor" section, which I usually read only for entertainment. What I glean from this paper is a general summary of the news highlights, which is also what I get from the TV news, since I only watch it while waiting for the weather report and the stock market numbers to come on. If anything catches my interest and I want more information about it, I look it up on Wiki, or submit the question to the Beaglesonian Institute.

Since you don't believe in God either, I shouldn't be surprised that you don't believe in the constitution. You fucking Atheists are all alike, you don't believe in nothing!

All that jawboning and stuff that you mentioned is part of the legislative process. Article I, Section 5 provides that "Each house may determine the rules of its proceedings", and that seems to be what they've come up with over the years. I don't think any of that negates the fact that "All legislative powers shall be vested in a Congress of the United States" (Article I, Section 1).

Congress does indeed have the power to "Declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water." (Article I, Section 8). The president, however, is "Commander in Chief of the army and navy" (Article II, Section 2). Historically, the president can send troops anywhere in the world for the execution of limited missions but, when it looks like they are going to be there for awhile, he consults with congress. For some reason, congress hasn't issued a formal declaration of war since World War II, but they have passed "war powers acts" from time to time, giving the president the authority to operate as if war had actually been declared. I think it has something to do with not wanting to recognize the enemy power as a sovereign nation.

I don't know if I'm for against the way they are currently handling that pot thing, I just think that it's interesting. Personally, I believe that the federal drug laws are all unconstitutional to start with, and I'm surprised that, to my knowledge, nobody has ever challenged them in court. The prohibition of alcohol required a constitutional amendment that was subsequently repealed. Shortly after the repeal of prohibition, the feds started issuing all those drug laws and didn't bother with the formality of another amendment. I don't know how they got away with that.

theory vs practice: high school civics vs the real world

I just made up Obamasucks.com. Well you know I say that but as soon as I said it I had to google it, and I admit I am surprised that there isn’t one. There is an Obama-sucks.com website, and then there are a lot of sites that are just selling Obama Sucks apparel, but I’ll wager they are not political at all and just trying to make money off guys who think that wearing an Obama Sucks baseball cap to the local pub will help them pick up chicks.

Ah it’s just that there are an array of columnists, led by that Krautsomething guy, who all they ever write about is how Obama sucks. Used to be, not that long ago, that columnists would write about foreign affairs or some political theory or something, but all this cadre ever writes about is how Obama sucks today because he is wearing the blue tie, and he sucks tomorrow because he will be wearing the red tie, and he will really suck next week when he shows up with no tie.

Lee was Cruz’s right-hand man when Cruz led the crusade to shut down the gummint. The Heritage Foundation is the most powerful think tank of the right wing. How do you read the newspaper and not pick this up?

It says that all legislation must originate in congress. Once they pass a bill, it goes to the president and becomes a law if he signs it. If he vetoes it, congress can over ride his veto with a 2/3 majority vote.

See, this is what I wanted to talk about with my theory vs practice thing. That’s the crap you learn in high school (remember that Paul Simon song, “...when I think back to all the crap I learned in high school...”), and I suppose that it is still followed in form, but all the loop holes are exploited, and there are things like bills going to committees to die, and this guy jawboning that guy and the party making deals, and then there is that filibuster thing that is not even mentioned in the constitution. And how about the law where the president can’t declare war without the consent of congress? Har har har.

Donald Trump was just one of many nutjob voices howling about the birth certificate, and he wasn’t the first one nor the major one. I’m with you in not knowing why the press gives him so much coverage. Anyway Obama gave up his long form as a sop to that crowd in general, not The Donald (as Fox always reverently refers to him) in particular. It seems to have shut them up a little bit.

I think the feds will continue to do stupid things like bomb pot fields and nab the occasional kingpin (because that always brings the drug trade to a sudden halt (sarcasm)), but they have never been much on nabbing the guy with a lid in his pocket. I don’t imagine they will interfere with marijuana in states where it’s legal, and by extension, probably not much in states where it’s illegal, and eventually as more states declare it legal, will get out of the game altogether.

Everything is going to make lawyers a lot of money.

"I Heard it Through the Grape Vine"

Remember that old song? I was just reminded of it, but I didn't really hear any of this stuff through the grape vine. Like I said, I read it in the newspaper. Our local paper does publish some syndicated political columnists, some from the left and some from the right, and their national news articles come from the API, but I haven't noticed any of their stuff that was credited to Obamasucks.com. Is that a real website or were you just being sarcastic? I am not familiar with either the Heritage Foundation or this "Lee character" whom you mentioned. I have heard of Bill Nye the Science Guy, but I have never watched his show and wouldn't recognize him if I saw him walking down the street.

I guess the allegation that Obama might be breaking the law here came from my own interpretation of the constitution. I am not a lawyer, and I don't even play one on TV, but I can read and have read the constitution. It says that all legislation must originate in congress. Once they pass a bill, it goes to the president and becomes a law if he signs it. If he vetoes it, congress can over ride his veto with a 2/3 majority vote. It does not say that the president can unilaterally change a law after it has been passed, but maybe that's not what has happened here. Sometimes a law delegates the power to make regulations to another government agency, as long as they stay within the boundaries that the law specifies. Maybe this law gave the president the power to change or extend the deadlines originally specified in the law. I don't know this for a fact, but it is one possibility. Another possibility is that selective enforcement of the laws thing which we talked about. I have never heard of this before but, of course, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I never say anything good about Obama because that's your job. Remember, I'm the right wing nut and you're the left wing nut. You want something good said about Obama, say it yo' damn self!

I never heard of this "long form - short form" thing before either, but I think it's pretty much what you said. I don't know why everybody made such a  big deal about it at the time, maybe it was a slow news week. I'm not sure what Donald Trump had to do with it, but I think he was considering running for president himself at the time. Funny, though, that none of the other opposition candidates seemed to have that kind of influence on Obama. Doesn't Trump have some kind of TV show where he goes around telling people "You're fired!"? I have never watched the show but have seen ads for it. What a dork!

I think this marijuana thing is more complicated than you seem to realize. It's not just about whether or not we believe in legalizing the stuff. In general, federal laws have supremacy over state laws, but I have never heard of federal laws being enforced in one state and not another. I don't understand how Obama could have tried to enforce the law in California and not been successful. If the states keep legalizing pot one by one, I suppose it would get to a point where the federal law would be difficult to enforce at all. Then, if another president comes in later and tries to reverse the trend, I don't know how that would play out. Mark my words: this thing is going to make some lawyers a lot of money someday.

A more laid back post

I may have gone a bit over the top with my last posting. It was on a Monday which comes after a Sunday, and I had just come off the Sunday shows that had featured that Lee character and some climate change denier. With Lee the interviewer was too lenient with the guy. You know they probe a little and catch them up on the more ridiculous elements of what they are saying, but then they let them wriggle off the hook. Some kind of professional courtesy I guess. The interviewers know that if they get to hard on the guys they won’t come on their shows anymore.

The climate denier was paired up with Bill Nye the science guy, and this is another thing I hate, when they pair up two people on opposing sides which gives the impression that the two sides are equal, for instance the guy claiming UFOs exist is just as probable as the big time scientist saying they aren’t.

And I guess that claim that Obama is breaking the law just struck me as one of the sillier claims being made in the Heritage Foundation factory. And of course the purveyors have no intention of doing anything about it, it’s just a red flag they want to wave in hopes of getting the attention of one of those Pacs to give them a shitload of money for their campaign.

You say you read it in the paper, but I’m guessing what you read was one of those Obamasucks.com columnists or maybe some interview with the above mentioned Lee, or really any of his ilk since they all get their talking points at the same place and they all sound alike.  How come you never read anything good about Obama that you want to talk about?  But I can see that I am doing one of the things that I preach against, which is attacking the messenger instead of the message. Kids never do this at home. But these attacks are just so relentless, that I just don’t have the time to go after them one by one.

Had you ever heard of a long and short birth certificate form? Do you have any idea what the difference is between the two. I never had, and I still don’t know what the difference is between the two. It would seem the short one is that thing you have to show to get your social security and passport or whatever. When you show that nobody ever asks, well where’s your long birth certificate form? I went to the google machine and discovered they are both issued at the same time and are pretty much the same except that sometimes you might need it to: for foreign adoptions or applications for dual citizenship but not to be president.

Why didn’t he just release it right away then? As soon as he released it, they wanted his college applications, his grade transcripts etc, and you know there would never be an end to it. What it’s all about is that the accusers want to be in the position of demanding documents that the accused doesn’t want to release (because he knows there would be no end to it), and this alone is what makes it look ‘fishy.’ What if I demanded the last three years of your property taxes and you refused to divulge them because you knew that if you did divulge them I would just ask for the three years before that, and so on. Wouldn’t it be ‘fishy’ if you refused to divulge them?

And I know I just said you should never attack the messenger just the message. But Donald Trump, really? Donald Trump? You know that he has sent a task force down to Hawaii to ferret out the truth like five years ago. Wow imagine what bombshells they will deliver.

I thought you were a states righter, the states are the laboratories of the nation, something like that, and now you want to wait for the feds to legalize pot before the states can? You know this whole state’s right thing is a dodge. Wallace claimed he was all for states rights when what he was basically for, and where most of his support came from, was racists and the state’s right to be racist. If it was something the feds were imposing that he liked he was all for it, it was just when it was opposing something he liked that he started waving the states rights flag.

But I digress, just to get you goat, I admit. For awhile there Obama was coming down hard on the California pot dispenseries, but lately I think he has given up on that, just another law he is not enforcing. I think marijuana is going the way of gay marriage. It is something the majority wants and it’s going to happen and no president can undo it.

What Have You Got Against Horses?

"I’m pretty sure it’s the executive prerogative to enforce or not enforce laws. I’m sure it’s happened many times before."

Well, maybe it is, but I've never heard of it before. The reason I brought this up in the first place is that I thought you might be more familiar with it than I am. I don't watch Fox News, and I am not familiar with all the people with whom you are comparing me. I have read about this in my local paper and saw it on the TV news a few times and I wondered about it, that's all.

Of course I am not a big fan of Obama's, I never voted for him and never will, but I would never attack him with lies or rumors like a lot of people have. If I wanted to do that I would be in league with those "birthers" who claim that he wasn't even born in the US. When I first heard about that, I hoped that it was true, but I looked it up on Wiki and concluded that it probably wasn't. I thought it was kind of fishy when congress and the courts refused to even consider it, but I suppose that they had their reasons. I also thought it was fishy when, years later, Donald Trump said that Obama should release the "long form" of his birth certificate, and he finally did. I mean, why would he resist doing that for years and then finally do it because Donald Trump, of all people, told him to? Of course that doesn't prove that the birthers are right, it just suggests that something fishy is going on. Just because I am curious and speculate about something like that, does that make me a "Foxie"?

I think there was some health care stuff passed during the Bush administration, something to do with prescription drugs. I understand that there were about a dozen different plans and we were supposed to pick one of them. Well I never did, mostly because I hardly ever take prescription drugs. The last time I did that was back in 2008 when I had that bleeding ulcer, and that was before I was even eligible for Medicare. When I did go on Medicare, I just signed up for Part A and Part B, and I haven't even used that yet.

You're right that Obamacare seems to be modeled on Romneycare, which is the main reason I didn't vote for Romney in the primary. I think it's also quite similar to the plan Hillary Clinton proposed when her husband was president. I didn't like it then, I don't like it now, and I wouldn't like it any better if a Republican proposed it. I believe that, if they are going to have any kind of national health plan, it should be a single payer plan like Canada has. If they don't want to do that, then they shouldn't do anything. Of course that's just my opinion, and I only have one vote. You seem to be saying that anything is better than nothing, and I disagree.

I do think that Marijuana thing is going to get interesting one of these days. I'm in favor of legalizing pot, but this seems like a funny way to do it. There's nothing wrong with something being legal in some states and illegal in others but, in this case, there is still the federal law to deal with. I think that the proper way to do it would be to repeal the federal law first, leaving it up to the individual states to decide whether or not they want to legalize it. The way they're doing it now is just asking for trouble. What's going to happen when the next president comes along and decides to reverse Obama's policy? Oh well, I suppose that's what courts and lawyers are for.





 

Fuck you all, and those horses too.

I know you are not a Foxie because you tell me that you aren’t, but whenever you say you heard something or talk is getting around, like this is something you picked up in casual conversation at the bait shop, and then what you say is something right out of Karl Rove’s talking points, I get a little suspicious. It’s the way the Foxies work you know, they come up with some absurd little attack on Obama and then they act like it is scuttlebutt they picked up on the street, like this is something the whole country is talking about.

I used to feel that as a good liberal it was my duty to defend the dems against these attacks, to take them apart, find the faulty logic, the fact that was probably a lie, parse the language so that it made sense, which turned out to be not so hard at all, but it took up a bit of time, and then I noticed when one of the attack team members was being interviewed and their argument was being rebutted, they would not even try to rebut the rebuttal, they would just repeat the accusation and then say how about that Benghazi. And if the current accusation didn’t seem to stick they would have a new one, generally just as faulty, in a few days, and eventually I quit even listening to the accusations because I don’t want to spend that much of my time rebutting arguments that they don’t even bother constructing carefully, because they are interested in quantity not quality.

It’s this process which I have spoken of before, where they just take any old argument as long as it is something bad about Obama, and they don’t care whether it is a good argument or not, because they just want quantity, they want to shoot a rain of accusations at the dems so that the dems waste their time arguing with them. They are the boys who cry wolf, over and over and over again, and fuck em, let em get eaten.

So anyway, I was watching my Sunday shows and up pops Lee, Cruz’s handmaiden, and he is spouting out almost word for word what you said. And finally the interviewer said something along the lines of if you think Obama is doing something illegal, why don’t you do something about it, and Lee started talking real fast and mumbling, and as near as I could make out of his explanation was that it would be too hard. Too hard? You say the prez is breaking the law and you are not going to do anything about it because it is too hard?

See if the rep message machine is not going to do any more work than that in manufacturing their accusations, why should I bother to rebut it?  The facts are out there, why don't you look for them?  Why should I have to do that?

I’m pretty sure it’s the executive prerogative to enforce or not enforce laws. I’m sure it’s happened many times before.

Our medical care system has been a crying shame for years, the republicans even agreed on this and yet all those years under W, they never came up with a plan, and now that Obama has one which is not so different from the ones Romney instituted and the Heritage foundation pumped for and their sole mantra, the pledge they each and everyone of them try to shout as loud as they can is Kill Obamacare. If Obama has to move a regulation around here and there, so what? It’s a big job, and all the reps want to do is kill it, and so fuck em. That’s my answer to all those gobbledy gook illogical stoopid arguments you and your republican buddies dream up in your stoopid think tanks, fuck you all. There I feel so much better.

Oh, the dems do the same things sometimes too, but since they have a program of sorts to defend they have to be more careful when shooting their mouths off so they do it less often, and I daresay when they do their arguments are more substantial then the tissues of the reps. Take my word for it.

Changing the Laws

When I asked you about Obama changing the laws, I didn't go into specifics because I thought you would be familiar with it. I didn't get this from any off-the-wall source, I got it from out local newspaper and the TV news. Our local paper gets all their national news from the AP wire service, and what little TV news I watch is on NBC, CBS, and the Bloomberg Channel. These are the ones I remember, but there may be more:

The first one I remember was way back when Obama first got elected. Several states had already legalized medical marijuana and, since then, Colorado has legalized it for recreational use. When the first state legalized it for medical use, I believe it was either California or Oregon, Bush was still in office. He announced that legalizing it at the state level would have no effect on the federal drug laws, which the feds would continue to enforce. After Obama took office, he announced that the feds would not enforce the federal drug laws in states that had legalized pot. Presumably, they would still enforce them in the sates that hadn't legalized it, although I don't remember him specifically saying that. Okay, I guess he didn't really change this law, he just said that he wasn't going to enforce it any longer. Nevertheless, I've never heard of a president doing that either. The only thing I can find in the constitution (Article II, Section 3) says that the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed". It doesn't say that he can pick and choose which laws he wants to enforce.

Some time after that, Obama announced that he would no longer enforce the federal Defense of Marriage Act because he believed that it was unconstitutional. He may have been right about that because the Supreme Court later did declare it unconstitutional. Traditionally, it has been the Supreme Court's job to declare a law unconstitutional, although the constitution is kind of vague about that. It doesn't say that the president either can or cannot do it, so I'll give him that one.

The rest of the incidents I remember pertain to Obamacare. First he extended for one year the deadline for employers of more than 50 workers to either provide health insurance or pay a penalty. He said that he did that because unemployment was still too high in the country, and some employers had threatened to either lay off or refrain from hiring to bring them under the 50 worker limit. There was also something about employees having to work at least 30 hours a week to qualify, and some employers had threatened to reduce their hours to less than that.

Then there was a big hullabaloo about millions of people having their insurance policies cancelled because they didn't fit Obamacare criteria. Before the bill had passed, Obama had repeatedly promised that people who liked their current insurance could keep it. When the shit hit the fan, he decided to let that requirement slide for another year too, but the insurance companies said that it would be too much trouble to reinstate all those policies for only one year so they weren't going to do it.

Just recently he extended another Obamacare deadline for a year, but I can't remember what it was. I had it a half hour ago, but it seems to have slipped away. It will probably come back to me after I have signed off, in which case I'll tell you about it next time.

I suppose you could say that he didn't really change these laws, he just decided not to enforce parts of them for now. I assume that these deadlines were written into the original law, but maybe not, maybe congress left them up to the discretion of the president. I have never heard of that happening before, but that doesn't mean it never happened. I was hoping that you knew something about it, but you seem to be saying that none of this is true. Well, maybe not, but that's what I read in the paper and heard on the news so, if it's wrong, it's their fault not mine.

two kinds of people in the world

Of course I was exaggerating when I said that nobody liked Tricky Dick, but not many. In 68 he was running against Humphrey who had to carry the burden of LBJ’s Vietnam policy, and in 72 he was running against McGovern who I personally thought was great but most Americans thought was a wild-eyed commie. Of course people mostly vote for the guy that they disliked least. It has mostly been that way in presidential races since we threw off he union jack. Some presidents want to be loved, some want to achieve certain things, some want to prove that they can win the prize. I think the latter describes Nixon.

Of course the majority is stupid. There is this fiction that makes the rounds that democracy leads to choosing the best candidates. This is clearly not true. The advantage of democracy is that when your candidate loses, you know that four years hence you can go back to the ballot box and maybe you will unseat him instead of having to go to the barricades and shoot it out with the other guys.

I guess the guys at the mill thought they could beat the bosses but when it turned out they couldn’t they took what they could get. Maybe some of them were deer lovers.

Obama is not changing the law. You would think that somebody who really believed that would be happy to say exactly what laws they thought he was changing, instead of just saying vaguely, ‘the laws.’ Wherever you have read that is a place where the big mouth loons bray long and loud. You would do yourself a favor by reading elsewhere, and your ears would be cleaner.

Back in high school I used to be a big fan of Robert Benchley, a humorist from a generation ago. One of my favorite quotes of his was that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe that there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t.

I, of course, am the sort of person who believes that there are two kinds of people in the world, and I am always dividing them into two groups for this or that reason, and there are people who agree with me, and people who don’t.

Oh I guess it’s an old story. There are dreamers who think of the way it should be, but they spend all their time dreaming, and there are those who are always doing things, but they don’t always know what they are doing. I don’t know. I will have to think about this more over the weekend.

"Let's Do Something, Even if it's Wrong!"

I have heard that presidents and vice presidents often don't like each other. The presidential candidate frequently picks a vice candidate for the votes he can bring in, not because he particularly likes the guy or agrees with him on the issues. As far as nobody liking Tricky Dickie his whole life, well then how did he get elected? Did all those people vote for him just because they disliked the other guy more? Why would a guy who believes that nobody likes him even go into politics in the first place?

During the Watergate scandal, a colleague of mine in the paper mill coined this phrase: "The trouble with majority rule is that the majority is stupid." I disagreed with him at first but, after he explained the logic behind his statement, I could see his point. Nixon was re-elected by a large majority and, six months later, that same majority was against him because of Watergate. Now Watergate was all over the news before the election, but it didn't seem to bother the majority at the time. Of course more shit came out after the election, but the main story was common knowledge before. About that same time, the majority of our union members voted to go on strike for higher wages. Six weeks later, they voted to go back to work for essentially the same deal that they had turned down before. If they were going to do that, why didn't they accept the offer in the first place ands save the six weeks of lost wages? Not only that, they voted to go back just before deer season so, after six weeks of unpaid vacation, we all ended up working on Opening Day!

When I was in the army, it was common for us to have to "hurry up and wait". This means that we were told to go somewhere and get ready for something that usually didn't happen when it was supposed to, if at all. At some point, somebody would shout out in frustration, "Let's do something even if it's wrong!" Of course nobody really wanted to do something wrong, it was just a sarcastic joke. While I like to get things done as much as the next guy, I would much rather do nothing than do something that I don't want to do. For instance, I don't mind getting my hands dirty cleaning fish or gutting out a deer, but I don't want to play baseball regardless of whether or not my hands get dirty in the process. So if a guy claims that I don't want to play baseball because I'm afraid of getting my hands dirty, he doesn't know what he's talking about. The point I'm trying to make is that, as far as I'm concerned, a lot of this political stuff doesn't need to be done at all, so why would I want to compromise on something like that? Half a loaf might be better than none but, if you don't like bread, why would you want even half a loaf?

I have read that there have been some mumblings and grumblings about Obama unilaterally changing the laws like he does but, as far as I know, nobody has made a serious attempt to stop him. I think you're right that, if there was a way to stop him, the Reps would have used it by now. There must be some kind of loophole that I don't know about that allows him to do that, and I was wondering if you knew what it was. I know that presidents and governors can temporarily suspend certain laws in times of great emergency, like war or natural disaster, but I don't think this qualifies. Som

All the King's Men

Currently reading a book on Ike and Dick. Inscrutable man that Ike behind his boyish friendly old man grin. Treated Dick atrociously, but then Dick was used to that, because his whole life long nobody liked him.

I guess we could loosely call utilitarianism the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, which leaves a lot of wiggle room, one of the greatest weaknesses of the theory. And I may not be exactly correct, but from my Philosophy 101 knowledge the stoics were a group of Romans who believed the world was too complicated and corrupt to deal with, so the path that wise man should choose is to keep himself morally straight and the hell with the rest of the world.

This is the contrast I want to make, between those who want to deal with the world and all it’s dirtiness and get themselves dirty too to remake it the way they want it to be, and those who see it as a lost cause and are more interested in keeping themselves pure.

And I want to take it to politics by comparing the ideologues who have a philosophy that appeals to them and that they think is morally right, and if it were just followed then it would be a better world, and politicians are judged by their willingness to follow or oppose that philosophy, and on the other hand the utilitarians, who in the words of one of my favorite characters, Willy Stark, from All the King’s Men, something like, “You want to make good in the world you gotta make it out of the bad, because that’s mostly what is there, you gotta get your hands dirty, you gotta deal with crooks, you gotta do a little bad yourself, or else you won’t get nothing done.”

What Willy is doing when he says this, something like this, I am just paraphrasing, is defending some crooked deal which would make some rich guy richer but also benefit the poor people. In the book/movie Willy goes from an idealistic honest guy who, as he rises to power, cuts a deal here, cuts a deal there, gets more and more corrupt until he is a despot. Power corrupts. Willy is based on Huey Long of Louisiana, himself a very interesting character. Very good movie based on it made in 1949, there is a later version with Sean Penn, but I hear it is pretty crappy.

Maybe the way to say it is the stoic believes it is a nation of laws, and the utilitarian believes it is a nation of men making laws, and if you want to get anything done you have to work with men who are imperfect vessels, while the stoic would wash his hands of these imperfect vessels and retire to some marsh in northern Michigan.

That’s the argument I am trying to set up.

I don’t think your idea of compromise is realistic. It’s not like I have my plan and you have yours and we split it down the middle because fair is fair. Nothing really fair about it. Each side tries to get the best deal they think they can get away with. If one side is more powerful, they get the bigger share. What you have to choose from is getting nothing done, or getting whatever you think you can settle for.

The law is not a single thing that is either broken or not broken. There are many laws and there are many interpretations of them. If the reps thought Obama was breaking the law they would be bringing a case against him instead of hollering insults on Twitter or whatever.

For Better or For Worse

You seem to know more about LBJ than I do, so I'll take your word for it. If I had been old enough to vote in those days, I would have voted for Goldwater because I had read a book that he had written. His main theme was that we should stop kissing up to the Russians, which made a lot of sense to me. I probably would have voted for Kennedy, even though my family were all Republicans, because I never did like Nixon. This was long before Watergate, and I wasn't familiar with his platform, I just never did like that guy. For some reason, every time I saw him on TV, he gave me the creeps. I liked Eisenhower though, he looked like a kindly old gent who could have been somebody's grandpa. The only two Democrats I remember voting for were George Wallace and George McGovern, mostly because neither of them was Nixon. Even then, I only voted Democrat for president, I voted Republican for every other office on the ballot. I guess you could say that I'm more of a Republican than anything else. I was only a card carrying party member for one year when I ran (unopposed) as a precinct delegate for Ronald Reagan. You know about my history with the American Independent Party and the Libertarian Party but, looking back on it now, that was mostly because I felt that the Republicans had veered too far to the left.

I guess you could call me a utilitarian too, with a couple of reservations. You say that they want to make the world a better place, and I'm all for that, provided that their idea of "better" is the same as my idea of "better". It has been my experience that "different" is not always better, sometimes it's worse. Some people say that the end justifies the means but, if the end itself sucks, it will still suck no matter what means are used to achieve it. The other reservation is about compromise. My idea of compromise is that I give up half of what I want, the other guy gives up half of what he wants, and we both meet in the middle. To many people, however, it means I give up half and they give up nothing. The next time we compromise, I'm expected to give up half of my remaining half, and they still give up nothing. If that's what you have to do to be a utilitarian, count me out.

I understand why Obama doesn't want to consult with congress, what I don't understand is how he is getting away with it. If you or I break the law, we go to jail. Why should it be any different for the president? He took an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the united States". If there is anything in the constitution that gives the president the power to change a law without involving congress, I am unaware of it.

stoic vs utilitarian

Kennedy’s program was popular enough to get him elected and then he thought he would just propose his program, and since it was popular it would sail through. The problem is that congress is not an easy car to drive. It’s not enough to know where you want to go, you have to know how to drive the car. Kennedy’s programs were toast before he was shot, Lyndon naturally took advantage of whatever sympathy he could get for the fallen president, but while that feeling was deep among the public, I doubt it cut much ice with hardened pols.

One thing about LBJ taking over, is that he was left completely in the dark as to what was going on while he was VP, so he kind of had to figure out what was going on on his own, some of the Kennedy advisors wanted to leave because they did not like Uncle Cornpone, but LBJ begged them to stay on because they knew what was going on.

The thing is he had been in the house, and he had been master of the senate and he knew how to drive that damned car. He had previously aligned himself with the southern senators so he had their ears to bend. He threatened them, he told them he was on their side but the pressure was so great that this was the best he could do and they better take it before things get worse, and he promised dams and whatnots to the western republicans who didn’t care all that much about race since their states were lily white, and he passed the civil rights bill. He knew this would be the end of the democrats in the south, maybe he thought sewing up the black vote for the dems was a worthy trade, or maybe he was just doing what he thought was the right thing.

He never seemed to be that big on equality of the races, always had a bit of a patronizing air towards nonwhites, but he knew they were poor, as he had been growing up, and he knew they could never do anything about it until they could vote and not be turned down for jobs or be refused places to live.

I guess that’s what I mean, it’s not enough to think the right thoughts (theory), you have to know how to put them into action (practice). I was thinking of this along the lines of the two threads of ethics that I distinguish, the stoics who thought the thing to do was act right yourself and stay away from the sinful world, and the utilitarians who thought your job on the planet was to make it a better place. More on this later.

That’s one of the drawbacks of being a loyal dem or rep (I imagine you don’t consider yourself a rep, but I wonder when was the last time you voted for a dem), is that you get taken for granted. Your vote is in their pocket and they don’t have to worry about you, maybe like the dems have the blacks and the reps have the religious, so the parties have to go after the swings, some of whom are level-headed deep thinkers, but most of them are ignorami who pay no attention to the news.

Gee why doesn’t Obama consult congress (and by congress of course you mean the house) when he wants to make a change in Obamacare? Oh maybe it’s because they have voted about twenty times to repeal it and pledge to the high heavens that the only good Obamacare is a dead Obamacare. When Beagles goes shopping for a new rifle, why doesn’t he invite along a couple gun control nuts to advise him?