Former Congressman Anthony Weiner has announced he is running for mayor of New York City, almost two years after resigning over a Twitter scandal.
A "twitter" scandal?
Nonsense. It was an "I can't keep my weiner in my pants -- and I'm married" scandal.
He's a "bit" of a polarizing case, he says. Oh really? What's polarizing about being unable to keep your oath to your wife Anthony?
Then again that such behavior no longer disqualifies a candidate says much about the state of our Union and the politicians in it.
Perhaps I'm old-fashioned but it is my position that if you wish to screw someone other than your wife the first thing you do is ask her for a divorce, and negotiate whatever terms are necessary to end your current relationship. Then you can "shuck the corn" with someone else.
We deserve the government we get when we sell our votes to people who have already proven they are not trustworthy and will screw those who they allegedly the closest to, and have the greatest allegiance to, at the drop of a hat.
We have done this folks -- to ourselves.
The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.
Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.
Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.
Fear?
It's a foregone conclusion.
There are cameras on light poles. There are cameras in cop cars. There are cameras everywhere, and they all are run by computers. Link a picture and other biometrics to you, and suddenly the government knows exactly where you are.
All the time.
Your Social Security number was originally issued "only for employment purposes." Now you need it to open a bank or brokerage account, many colleges and even elementary schools try to require it and more.
A couple of years ago the chair of the Florida Libertarian Party surrendered his own driver license rather than comply with "Real ID." His claim was that providing proof of who he was in a form that the government deemed acceptable was an unreasonable intrusion.
He was and is wrong and I told him so at the time.
The Declaration of Independence enumerates three rights that are unalienable -- that is, they cannot be legitimately taken from you. Those are the right to life, liberty and pursuit (but not attainment) of happiness.
Liberty clearly includes choosing where you happen to be (physically) at any given point in time. We maintain a system of public roads paid for by all of us through taxation. They are built for use by vehicles of the day; at one time "roads" were suitable for use by horses and carriages; now they are suitable for use by automobiles and motorcycles. Maintaining a public system of roads is one of the historical duties of governments and goes back to at least Roman times!
If you accept that you have a right to liberty then you have a right to use the common means of the day upon the public ways to change where you physically are. This right is binary -- you either possess it or not. A right cannot be conditioned upon a license; that is not a right at all, but rather a privilege.
The argument is often raised that a "driver license" denotes at least minimum competence in the operation of a vehicle. Oh really? And on what basis do you make this claim? When was the last time you had to show a driver license for anything related to driving, as compared against something not related to driving -- say, getting on an airplane, buying a bottle of booze or using a credit card?
If you throw away your right to liberty then you have ceded the argument on identification. After all if the government has the right to make travel a privilege -- that is, you no longer have the right to liberty in that your ability to change your location is now a privilege rather than a right -- then government has the ability to condition that privilege as it sees fit and may change those terms from time to time if it wishes.
Further, if you accept that changing your location is a privilege then in order to prevent fraud government has the ability to determine with certainty who you are. Suddenly "Real ID" is both necessary and proper; fraud is a common law crime no matter who it is committed against. Determining that you really are who you say you are to prevent you from exercising a privilege you are not entitled to is a necessary and proper component of what you already ceded.
That privilege now has yet another aspect added to it -- the ability to monitor your exercise of it as the government sees fit.
Remember, you agreed then and continue to agree today that Liberty -- the ability to choose where, physically, your body is and to alter that using the means common in the present day -- is not a right but rather a privilege.
This is what happens when you play games with logic; you cede that which was claimed as an unalienable right and in doing so your leukemia-ridden grandmother has her vagina probed by a TSA agent because, well, there is no right to travel. The TSA tells you "if you don't like it then drive!" and when you attempt to do so you find that since you ceded Liberty you have no right to drive unmolested without being tracked either!
And heh, if Liberty is no longer a right, because you simply don't give a damn and both haven't and won't stand and defend what your forefathers claimed as natural right, then I suppose Life is similarly subject to privilege.
Yes?
Now you have something new to think about.
A court challenge by federal immigration agents seeking to block President Barack Obama’s deferred-deportation initiative will probably succeed, a judge said.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Dallas today put off his own decision on whether to grant the request for a preliminary injunction by 10 U.S. Immigration and Customs agents. He asked both sides to file additional arguments no later than May 6.
There was no final decision but the indication that the challenge will likely succeed is good news.
Now the question becomes whether Obama will honor the court's decision when it comes, or whether he'll ignore it -- and if he does ignore it whether the judge will start holding people in contempt of court, including quite-possibly the President.
It will also be interesting to see whether Congress will find its nuts and file impeachment proceedings or if the House will simply cut off his funding if he refuses to comply.
The latter is something the Republican majority can do without a single Democrat vote and there is not jack the Democrats or Obama can do about it.
Now explain the problem I am about to lay out: Lying to Congress is a crime.
Anyone suborning perjury to Congress has committed a federal crime.
Where are the demands for indictments and, since we know Holder will not prosecute, where are the articles of impeachment against everyone involved up and down the line?
Oh yeah Issa, it's great that you bring this sort of thing forward but without a big bite to go with it you're whining -- and lying about your claimed "outrage."
Congress has the tools to put a stop to this crap by enforcing the law. That which the US AG refuses to prosecute can be and properly is grounds to impeach said AG (see Watergate.) That which The President refuses to direct the AG to prosecute when clear evidence of perjury before Congress is exposed gives grounds to Congress for his impeachment (again, see Watergate.)
If The Senate refuses to convict that is their right, but all revenue bills must originate in The House, and if Boehner had even one ball, say much less two, he and you could demand compliance and enforce that demand by refusing to fund anything until Holder and Obama prosecuted the people responsible or resigned and/or were impeached.
In short The House has full authority to resolve this, but you refuse to use it.
That makes you equal co-conspirators and accessories after the fact.
Have a nice day jackass.
U.S. authorities were on their way to a mountainous region in southern Russia to interview the parents of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, as more details emerged about the brothers' recent activities in the U.S., including word of where the deadly explosives may have been purchased and that the family relied on welfare for at least some of their time here.
The brothers hated America.
They loved, however, "transitional assistance benefits" -- in other words, welfare.
That's right folks -- we paid these clowns to live while they were radicalizing themselves and declaring that America was "the great Satan" and worthy of bombing.
How's it feel in those liberal bastions this morning? You now have hard proof that your political policies and "redistribution" factually funded these clowns while they made their plans to blow up runners at the Marathon.
Take a bow, liberals, to the fruits of your policy.
It gets better.
The elder brother bought fireworks -- a lot of them too ($400 worth) -- in February. That's not exactly a time when most people shoot off fireworks, is it? Even better, he bought fireworks that are full of both lift and bursting charges which are typically black-powder compounds -- exactly the sort of explosive that was identified in the bombs.
The Fibbies have said that he didn't buy enough to make the bombs, but that's just one sale they know of. This particular fireworks dealer scanned the guy's driver license, but unless something has changed recently this is pretty uncommon. I've bought plenty of fireworks and the only thing most of the places I've gone to have wanted is my money. How many more fireworks stores did these two visit?
There goes the "mad bomber uses GUN SUPPLIES" argument too!
It gets even better -- a majority of Bostonians apparently figured out that the cops would be happy to come by and sweep up the mess after the terrorists got done with them. See, the majority seem to have responded that they'd have preferred to have a gun during such an event.
Naw, go figure -- you have a couple of madmen on the loose who have proved they'll walk up to cops and shoot them, and the people would like to have a fighting chance at self-defense?
One by one this incident is taking the bogus arguments used for years by the lying left and demolishing them. The terrorists were not "Jesus-loving, bible-banging right-wing freaks" -- they were Muslims. The terrorists were not native-born Americans, they were immigrants that we coddled and allowed to remain in the country despite one of them committing a disqualifying crime. We not only ignored the older brother's domestic violence we funded them with welfare, literally paying them to live while they hated us and ultimately decided to try to kill us all. The guns the terrorists bought were not purchased through some "loophole" since there wasn't one that was possible given the state's laws on firearms, proving that a criminal doesn't give a damn about laws whether they pertain to guns or anything else. Massachusetts has factually had a near-doubling of murders since passing its "strict" gun control, about 60 a year, while the mad bombers managed to kill four, meaning that the bombers did less damage than one month's butcher bill from Massachusetts liberal gun-banning law, drawing a clear picture on exactly how destructive said laws have been to the life and liberty of Massachusetts residents.
Those on the left have run out of both arguments and excuses and this incident runs the flag all the way up the pole on that account.
