Attacking The Constitution

The New York Times takes up the assault of the Constitution.

The Constitution has seen better days...In a television interview during a visit to Egypt last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court seemed to agree. “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.

Good, let's send a member of the Supreme Court to a foreign country to tell them that our Constitution is not worth emulating. And certainly we don't want to finish the article without taking a backhand slap at the Bill of Rights.

It has its idiosyncrasies. Only 2 percent of the world’s constitutions protect, as the Second Amendment does, a right to bear arms. (Its brothers in arms are Guatemala and Mexico.)

Yessireebob, we could really fix those pesky rights if we wrote a new Constitution. Maybe one more like the enlightened Canadians.

The Canadian Charter is both more expansive and less absolute. It guarantees equal rights for women and disabled people, allows affirmative action and requires that those arrested be informed of their rights. On the other hand, it balances those rights against “such reasonable limits” as “can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

The Canadian Charter does not guarantee rights. Because once you bring in "reasonable limits" they are not rights at all.

As they quote Justice Scalia, a Constitution is always just a "parchment guarantee". Ours included. Looks like the progressives think we need a new one.

Bloggers Read Other Blogs

Sometimes I wonder if the only people reading my posts are other bloggers. Who knows? If you gave me a radio station, I'd broadcast. A newspaper, I'd publish. It's enough that we get to talk among ourselves and meet like minded people. It's the internet.

Robert at My Tumultuous Adventure tagged me with the latest award. Which is nice, although it's supposed to go to your top 5 bloggers with less than 200 followers. So it's sort of saying, "Hey, you're doing great, keep hollering down that well, the frogs are almost convinced!"


1. 3 Boxes of B.S. A steady blogger. I don't know, he may have 10,000 readers, but he writes thoughtful posts and he one of my regular stops. Some range reports, an occasional insight into a news article. He should be on your blogroll.

2.Lagniappe's Lair The Murphy posts alone should do it, along with all the gun blogging.

3.WilsonBlog Gunblogging and short stories, too. He doesn't post every day, but I check his site regularly.

4.True Blue Sam Something different. Old engines, old music, some gunnie stuff. This one is always interesting and he should be drawing a crowd.

5. A Trainwreck in Maxwell I see he's already been tagged, but more people should be reading him, so I'll tag him again. Political observations, with a hint of snark.

That's my 5. Any one of them should have more readers than the New York Times.

Looking For Something I Can Do

Went to the local Garand match Saturday. We had a visitor, a young man who came with his mother. He borrowed a rifle. Then he shot a 294.

Prone 99 2-X, Rapid 98 0-X, Offhand 97 2-X

Knitting. I could do knitting. Or maybe jigsaw puzzles.

I'd need 4 or 5 extra scoring shots to get a 294. On a good day.

Nothing Cute At All

Edge sees it differently. Since he let his blog lapse, I offer you his point of view.

Obama will be completely unstoppable if he gets 4 more years...

if this happens I don't want to hear one complaint about him or how things are. You wanted it? You got it.

The weight of his next four years will be squarely on the shoulders of those who thought it would be cute to protest vote with the Libertarians or not vote at all.

I hope you all can live with that, because I damn sure can't.

Vote Republican.

There is nothing cute about my decision. It is completely serious. Mitt Romney has a very liberal voting record. I cannot count on him to turn around the economy or the spending. I cannot count on him to defend the 2nd Amendment. I cannot count on him to do anything but talk conservative during the campaign and then return to form if he wins.

Sure, maybe he slows things down, but the trestle is out. If the train keeps going, does it matter if we're going 25 or 60 miles an hour?

If there is not a candidate that sees the deficit and the debt as a mortal crisis facing our country, a candidate that promises to balance the budget and begin to pay down the debt, then there is no meaningful choice at all.

Going further, this cannot just be the White House. We need candidates for the House and Senate that will slam the brakes on the spending. It no longer matters what the spending is for. Social Security, entitlements, foreign aid, defense, everything needs to be cut. Cut it across the board until the government is spending less than it takes in. Treat it like the crisis it is.

But until that happens, don't pretend that there is any difference between Mitt Romney and Pr. Obama. If we don't stop and reverse direction on spending, we will eventually get to the point that it is unrecoverable.

Borepatch Calls The Election

Since Borepatch is looking at the numbers and calling the 2012 election, I thought it would be a good moment to revisit my post of June 3rd of last year.

Mitt Romney has declared his candidacy of the Republican nomination. Fine. I declare my opposition to that candidacy. Romney will be more politics as usual. Romney will be for big government. Romney will tweak Obamacare and call it all better. Romney will reach across the aisle and give the Democrats what they want in the name of bipartisanship. Romney's the one that set up the national model for socialized communist health care in Massachusetts. Romney's record on the 2nd Amendment will not pass muster.

It would be better to let the Democrats win again and work to elect a 3rd party candidate, even if we lose, than to go further down the path with the Same Old Republican Crap. SORC™ is my own acronyn for what we have had to choose from in the last several elections. It got us Dole, Bush Jr., and McCain. Honestly, they may have slowed the rate of decline, but that's not enough anymore.

If you're willing to vote for SORC™, on the grounds that it's better than Obama, you're willing to say that it's okay to run the country off the economic cliff as long as we don't go too fast. I'm not willing to do that. Better to refuse to support them, to leave them wondering how they were beaten so badly, and to at least race on down the road to ruin with the Democrats at the wheel.

Doing The Math

The sound of inevitability.

Vague Directions -- James McMurtry

This place you say you're looking for
It's a good ways off the track
It'd take a quarter tank of Firechief
Just getting there and back


And of course there wasn't no pavement then
Once you got yourself around that bend
There wasn't nothing but the whistling wind
When I was just a boy



H/T to reader and commenter Egocentrist