He was a leader.
He was an innovator.
He stood up when many wouldn’t. He preached love while others practiced hate.
He took the worst of us, saw the best in them and made us ALL believe that not only should we do better, but that we all would do better.
Martin’s message meant and means many things, but it doesn’t mean that we can use race as a means to implement policy.
China is reporting that the nation is experiencing localized brown outs. Cities are without electric power.
Why?
Because power plants don’t have coal to make electricity.
Why?
No one is mining coal. No money in it.
Why?
The Chinese government mandates coal below market rates.
Econ 101.
I didn’t listen to Obama live the other night as he delivered his speech in Tucson. Partly ’cause I was busy but mostly because I didn’t wanna listen to him talk on about the events.
I’m jaded. I’m bias.
My die is cast.
He has a long LONG way to go to create an environment in which I see him in a different light than I did, say, yesterday morning.
But I watched this speech just now.
Events like this are seminal. We’ll remember this forever. Or for a long time at least. Maybe it’ll linger only for those of us old enough and plugged in enough to know what happened.
For my kids, it might make a note in the history book for their civics course; maybe not.
I get twisted by stuff like this. All the normal stuff to be sure. The tragedy of the story, the victims that passed away, the victims that lived. Hell, the victim that is the shooter – what musta happened to him to make him wanna do that.
But somewhere inside, I felt we were missin’ somethin’.
Thankfully much of the rhetoric surrounding global warming climate change has died down. With the stunning leak of the papers in the UK and with Al Gore revealing how he trumped up the crisis so that he could do well in Iowa, we are seeing the outcry begin to diminish.
But it’s still out there and we need to pay attention. So, here it is, a small lesson in what makes the planet warm and cold.
Taking my morning coffee reading the internet. Saw an article that grabbed my interest:
America’s Healthiest & Unhealthiest States
I decided to take a look, I was interested in what the survey used as criteria in making their ranking. While the exact order of the list would be interesting in a trivia sort of way, I knew that the northern states would rank near the top while the deep south struggled. I guessed that Mississippi would rank either 50th or 49th.
Low and behold, what to my wondering eyes did appear?
Posted in Politics: National, Raising Men
Tagged Crosshairs, Free Speech, Leftist, Politics
Some time ago I posted on the development that cribs were being banned. See, it appeared that 30 or so kids in the last 10 years had died while in a crib. so, well, the government being what the government is, decided to band ’em.
The sky is falling.
The latest? Well, see below.
I’m not sure what it means; I wanna stay away from the very thing I suspect it is.
I was reading though Renaissance Guy this morning when he brought up the very thing I’ve been rattling around:
…in the Fort Hood shooting there was a Muslim man who clearly considered himself part of the massive struggle that radical Muslims call jihad. In that case, however, the media darlings tried and tried to avoid reporting it.
…
in the Tucson shooting there allegedly and apparently is a lone man, deeply disturbed and incoherent, with no clearly dilineated political persuasion and no definite motive. It’s a bit too soon to tell for certain, but it appears that they [the media] were dead wrong again…
Let’s take a look.
Posted in Liberty, Politics: National
Tagged Democrat, Islam, Jihad, Leftist, Liberal, Main Stream Media, Muslim, Talk Radio, Tucson
Continuing on that compare and contrast of the middle class, both now and “then”, I began to wonder what, exactly, the middle class is.
Because the genesis of this project involved Ben over at Drudge Retort, I thought it should include what he thought:
Here’s a good definition of the middle class:
MIT economist Frank Levy believes that those in the middle class have enough money to afford the basic building blocks of a good life, including a house, a car and money to pay necessary bills. He suggests that families in their prime earning years are middle class if they fall between $30,000 and $90,000.
I like that as a working definition; simple, easy to visualize and a well understood process from taking $50-90k in today’s money and pivoting backwards to “yesterday’s” money.
However, I couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t another definition. Maybe something surrounding what we consider the “American Dream”. I’ve always thought that middle class was being able to have “some” nice things. Kinda like, a car, maybe two. Own your own house with the “white picket fence”. Send your kids to college.
Maybe what we need to do is identify a specific basket of goods and see how much money the middle class family has left over. Maybe both.
The bedrock principle that the authors of Obamacare used to legally justify the federal government regulating health insurance is the “Commerce Clause”. Basically, this clause states that the federal government has the right to regulate all interstate trade to ensure that the economic interests of America are met.
Except, health insurance is not allowed to be sold across state lines.
It’s not inTER-state trade. In’s inTRA-state trade.
Ahhh….but I forgot.
Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that dramatically increased the power of the federal government to regulate economic activity. A farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed his chickens. The U.S. government had imposed limits on wheat production based on acreage owned by a farmer, in order to drive up wheat prices during the Great Depression, and Filburn was growing more than the limits permitted. Filburn was ordered to destroy his crops and pay a fine, even though he was producing the excess wheat for his own use and had no intention of selling it.
The Supreme Court, interpreting the United States Constitution’s Commerce Clause under Article 1 Section 8 (which permits the United States Congress “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;”) decided that, because Filburn’s wheat growing activities reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for chicken feed on the open market, and because wheat was traded nationally, Filburn’s production of more wheat than he was allotted was affecting interstate commerce, and so could be regulated by the federal government.
Long ago the Leftists felt that they had the answer to the Great Depression. And they passed many laws intended to help us through this great time. However, they were illegal laws and the Supreme Court struck them down.
…sought to counter this entrenched opposition to his political agenda by expanding the number of justices in order to create a pro-New Deal majority on the bench.
{His} legislation was unveiled on February 5, 1937 and was the subject, on March 9, 1937, of one of Roosevelt’s Fireside chats. Shortly after the radio address, on March 29, the Supreme Court published its opinion upholding a Washington state minimum wage law in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish by a 5–4 ruling, after Associate Justice Owen Roberts had joined with the wing of the bench more sympathetic to the New Deal.
So, because FDR was a thief who stole the right of a citizen from growing enough wheat to feed his animals, we now have to live through a law that seeks to regulate inter-state trade of a commodity that is illegal to sell inter-state.
Nice!
Posted in Government, Liberty, Politics: National
Tagged Commerce Clause, FDR, Health Care, Health Insurance, Individual Mandate, Leftist