…and after considerable thought we’ve decided that our leaders, government, and the media are either completely ignorant of civics and how our system of government works…or that they’re just a bunch of liars who want to score political points (and that goes for both parties). After careful consideration…and as somebody famous once said since I didn’t make this quote up…”How can you tell if a politician is lying? Easy…his lips are moving.”

Anyways we figgger it is most likely Door #2 above.

But before we get to ‘dat…we dindunuffin this week. Went for Connie’s blood samples at the lab but the PA didn’t put the right ICD codes on the request and it was gonna cost us $500…so she’s emailed to the doc to see if they really need those (she thinks some are unneeded based on her laboratory career and diagnostic knowledge) and if they are to give her an ICD code that will get insurance to pay for ‘em. Picked up some gravel at the Home Depot to put around the exits from our lanai where the water puddles, got some take out pulled pork from the BBQ place that was pretty good and that was about it.

A couple of examples just from this week in the news.

You probably read about how John Lewis…the “Civil Rights Icon” who later represented Atlanta in the House of Representatives for 30something years passed away recently. Immediately Mayor Bottoms of Atlanta…yes, that’s really her name…ordered that flags in the city be lowered to half staff until his funeral. The governor of Georgia also ordered this statewide. Meanwhile…the President ordered the flag at the White House to be half staffed for the Saturday after his death late Friday evening. Naturally…Ms. Bottoms and Governor Kemp are being hailed as heroes while the President is being decried as a callous racist. The next day…the head of the Congressional Black Caucus demanded that the President lower the flag to half staff nationwide until Congressman Lewis was interred.

Now I don’t really know all that many details about the late Congressman…but it is fair to say he was around all through the Civil Rights movement and has continued to represent his district for a long time in Congress. If you put all the political bias and BS aside…he certainly had his flaws…I don’t know what they are specifically but humans all have good and bad qualities (bears don’t because…well…we’re bears)…so unless we had he Second Coming when nobody was looking the Congressman had flaws. I’m sure that the actual fact is that he was neither the “let’s declare a national holiday for him” hero that one side claims…nor was he the race baiting corrupt politician the other side claims…but he was somewhere in the middle. That’s not really relevant though.

So…who’s right? Well…if you actually go and read the flag code about who can order flags to be half staffed…and the flag code and rules are enshrined in the U.S. Code so it is federal law…only the President or governors can so order. So…Ms. Bottoms clearly broke federal law by ordering them to be lowered. However…long standing tradition is that mayors routinely order this for local long time former leaders or for slain law enforcement officers…so mebbe her transgression is not so bad. The flag code also specifies how long flags are to be half staffed…and for ordinary members of congress it is the date of their death and the following day.

Technically…the President acted in accordance with the law and the governor and mayor did not…so why the hue and cry over it? I have to admit…I almost didn’t include this example because of the traditional declarations of half staff by mayors but thought that actually knowing what the law of the land says should also be considered before the media condemns either side.

The second example of the week…Ms. Pelosi is the guilty party here. You might recall…if you’re old enough…that back in the 1960s the Voting Rights Act was passed and has been reauthorized periodically since then. What the VRA says is that 12 states…mostly southern…must have Justice Department approval before making any changes to voting rules, locations and such…essentially the rights of those states to conduct their elections had to be approved by the federal government. Now there were a lot of irregularities in voting in these states back previous to the VRA being enacted…but then there were also irregularities in Detroit, Chicago, the state if Illinois, NYC, and just about other state and jurisdiction. Be that as it may…the VRA was enacted and reauthorized for many years…typically for 5 years at a time but for 25 years in 2006 so it will expire in 2021 unless reauthorized.

Back in 19870…the SCOTUS upheld the constitutionality of the pre-clearance requirement in the law…but some 40 years later Shelby County in Alabama filed suit and eventually the case made it’s way to the SCOTUS again…essentially saying that the criteria for which states required clearance were outdated. In Shelby County vs Holder…the SCOTUS held in 2013 that the county was correct and that the criteria were in fact outdated and that therefore they were an unnecessary burden on the equal sovereignty of the states. According to Wikipedia…Congress could authorize new criteria and the pre-clearance requirement would be re-instituted but the actual decision said nothing about whether new clearance criteria would reenable the provisions of section 5 of the VRA which is where the pre-clearance restrictions are listed.

Ms. Pelosi had her House pass a bill reauthorizing the act for (I believe) another 25 years and sent it over to the Senate…which so far has taken no action as their position is that SCOTUS has ruled the criteria unconstitutional based on age AND equal sovereignty of the various states…that means that each state should have equal sovereignty and if NY can change their election laws then AL or SC or GA is also allowed to change them. Her position…like all other loose constructionists…is to read additional meaning into the words the SCOTUS or Constitution actually say in order to get whatever they want this week. Nothing wrong with that idea in general…there have been loose and strict constructionists (generally this corresponds to liberal and conservative points of view) ever since the Constitution was founded.

What Ms. Pelosi said after Congressman Lewis passing…was that the Senate should “immediately rename the VRA Reauthorization Act to the John Lewis Voting Rights Act” and pass it since it would overturn the misguided SCOTUS decision by reinstating the same 12 states for pre-clearance and because they were wrong in stating that all states should be treated equally”. Essentially…she stated that Congress can override the decision of SCOTUS by passing legislation.

Now either Ms. Pelosi is completely clueless about the relationship between the SCOTUS and the legislature…which I highly doubt as she is of an age so that she went to high school when Civics and American Government were still a required subject…or else she is just lying for political points because she knows that most people these days either never took or have forgotten their civics lessons. The truth is that if SCOTUS declares something to be unconstitutional…then it is just that…unconstitutional. Since we have three distinct branches of government…there is a way for the legislature to solve that problem…but again the Constitution provides a solution…it is known as a constitutional amendment. That’s too hard for the Democratic Party though…so it’s easier to just lie to the public and convince them that is only those “blatantly partisan Republicans” preventing progress.

Speaking of blatantly partisan…I’ve noticed over the past few years that…at least as far as SCOTUS goes…the liberals on the court are far more likely to vote as a block on any issue than the conservative justices are…there were several decisions both this session and in previous ones where the decision came down in favor of the liberal side because different conservative justices actually read and applied the words in the Constitution when voting as opposed to the liberal justices who think the Constitution means what we want it to mean. If anything…the liberals are far more partisan in their voting…only rarely agreeing with the conservatives on anything.

Another one…up in NYC…as you know there is a BLM mural painted on the street outside one of the hotels owned by the President’s business…a week or so back a pro police group applied to the mayor for permission to paint a Blue Lives Matter mural on the street outside 1 Police Plaza where the department is headquartered. So far…this is “still under review” by the mayor…I guess he’s hoping the issue will go away if he ignores it. Seems to me that if he allows the painting of a BLM mural on the street he also has to allow a Blue Lives Matter mural.

Similar situation…in Redwood City CA which also has a BLM mural painted on the street…a supporter of the President applied for permission to put up a MAGA 2020 mural since both are primarily political statements. Rather than approve this…the city removed the BLM mural in the middle of the night and claimed that it was always intended to be temporary.

Another one…I couldn’t decide whether this one was politicians lying for political gain or whether it falls under Stupid Finds A Way…it is really both I think. Up in NY…the governor ordered that every voter be mailed a mail in ballot for the primary a few weeks back regardless of whether they asked for it or not…the current state law saw that they are only provided on request by the voter but apparently the governor thinks that he can issue an executive order to over ride the law…but then he complains when the President does essentially the same thing. Anyways…as part of his executive order…he required that each ballot also be sent out with a postage paid envelope for it’s return…so that no voter would not be able to vote because they lacked money for a stamp. 

So…the ballots went out and a whole bunch of them got returned…about 65,000 of them as opposed 40,000 people who voted in person. State law in NY says that mail in ballots must be postmarked no later than Election Day and received by a later date. The problem arises because the governor ignored the law, US Post Office procedures, and common sense…of these 65,000 mailed in ballots about 1/3 of them were rejected by elections officials because…and I’m not making this up…the Post Office does not postmark prepaid postage envelopes by rule, they just deliver them. Since they were not postmarked at all…they could not be verified to have been postmarked by Election Day…and hence were declared invalid.

Sounds pretty open and shut to me…the governor should have not sent out prepaid postage envelopes…which would have required a stamp…which would have then been postmarked…which would have then been able to be verified and hence counted. His mistake…because he was not smart enough to do it either the legal way or the right way.

Naturally…voters rights groups have filed a lawsuit to have all of the received absentee ballots counted…essentially their lawsuit demands that state law be ignored because it suits the demands of the lawsuit filers.

There’s a very similar situation down in FL as I discussed in my post about whether the “sentence” of a felon includes paying fines and restitution as specified by the sentencing judge…and I think that eventually the courts will agree with the governor that the law says what it says…and that the problem of the felons who won’t be able to vote because they didn’t pay yet are not the victims of an illegal poll tax but rather the victims of their own non-payment and the failure of the idiots that wrote Amendment 4 to properly research the meaning of the word “sentence” and write their amendment appropriately…my personal guess is that if they had specified only the confinement and probation portions of the sentence they thought that the anti-felon voting folks would have made political points out of the non payment issue so they were trying to sneak one past the voting public and thus Stupid Finds A Way.

Liberals…activists…and the WAMM…are all up in arms over the “federal jack booted thugs” who are “driving around in unmarked vans and grabbing peaceful protesters off the street in Portland”. I’ve got 2 thoughts on this. First…I’ve not seen any non-biased journalism reporting that this kidnapping is actually happening as opposed to arresting violent protesters…everything reported that I’ve seen has been from progressive media outlets who get their panties in a wad over just about everything…I can’t say it isn’t happening but that the jury is still out. Second…I fail to see how using federal law enforcement to protect federal property when the local mayor and governor refuse to do so is a problem. Portland is having a serious violent protester problem…and while I have zero issue with actual peaceful protesters…their right to protest unmolested stops as soon as the first rock or Molotov cocktail is thrown and the right of the government to stop riots starts at the same point. Back in the day when we lived in Fairfax…Chief Ramsey of the Washington DC met with protester leaders when a peaceful protest was scheduled…he did this routinely and said that his officers would exercise restraint as long as the protest remained peaceful. However he also made it clear that the onus was on the leaders of the protest to ensure that it remained peaceful…and that a soon as the first rock was thrown, fire set, or window smashed that his officers would take action. As it turned out…this approach was quite successful…folks could protest the G8 Meeting, have the Million Man March, or whatever then calmly go home when it was over and the city didn’t have riots like Portland is currently undergoing. His “you play nice and we’ll play nice” approach worked.

In the Stupid Finds A Way department.

Now the WAMM is demanding that the Texas Rangers baseball team name is also racist and hence needs to be changed. So with the Redskins gone and perhaps the Rangers following…I took a quick look at the team names for the NFL, NBA, NHL, and major league baseball to see how many others need to go based on political correctness…NFL 9 of 32 teams, NBA 1 of 30, NHL 8 of 31, and baseball 8 of 30.

Really…the WAMM needs to get a grip.

I ran across an Op-Ed by a novelist and journalist from Nigeria…who naturally enough is a black woman. She says that her great grandfather sold slaves…and that the rest of the world needs to get over it. His actions…while against current social/political/legal/whatever norms…were perfectly acceptable under the norms of his time period…and the norms of today will be different 200 years from now and people today should not be judged by those different norms 200 years from now.

I ran across another one as well…this probably falls under the “those in glass houses” category. The family that owns The NY Times…yeah, that famous bastion of liberal propaganda…well back in the day numerous members of the family…well…actually owned slaves and did not set them free immediately. I don’t hear any condemnation of the NYT though…no sirree Bob, only those who are not card carrying WAMM members get blamed for their ancestor’s misdeeds.

I saw this week that another key pillar of the systemic racism we have is…and I’m not making this up…a bias against something called African American English. Now I’ve never heard that particular term until this week…but apparently AAE consists of the refusal to speak in grammatically correct sentences, spell words correctly (at least correctly as the Oxford Dictionary would indicate), and maximization of the usage of the N word and the F word. As I’ve said in previous posts…accents are just fine but expecting the usage of proper grammar really isn’t asking too much. 

Speaking of accents…our new pastor at Saint Therese…well, he’s not actually the pastor yet just the administrator but that is how Bishops do things…they make the new pastor the administrator and after a year or two he becomes the pastor although I’m not sure what the difference is in their ability to run the parish as opposed to being overseen by the bishop for the first year or two I guess…anyway Father Jan Antonik. He’s a pretty nice guy. He is of Polish descent…his parents came here when he was an infant and he is in his mid 40s or so…and I could understand a bit of an accent just like southerners have one or New Yorkers have one or whatever. What I really didn’t expect was that after 40 years living here in the US, attending school, college, seminary, and serving as a priest for 15 years or so that he would still sound like he just got here yesterday. I suppose we’ll get used to him…and I’m not demeaning his accent at all…just surprised that he hasn’t lost a lot of his accent over the years. I know that your accent is pretty well established by the time you’re 5 or so…but since he came as an infant and learned English here I would have expected him to have less of an accent. Maybe he’s just one of those that doesn’t lose it…could be similar to Connie who despite being born and raised in NJ…back when we visited Neil’s parents in AL or his sister who moved to TN…after about 2 days any of his family you would swear she had never left the antebellum south and would be asking her where her hoop skirt was. I dunno.

I saw another post this week that demands that Apple needs to change their mask emoji…you know the little cartoon figure that is used for texting…the claim was that their emoji with the surgical mask on…which predates the CoViD by a couple of years…it is your typical round yellow circle face with eyes and a mask. Anyway…according to the post…the eyes look too similar to the crying emoji with the tear and this clearly means that the mask emoji is sad…and that clearly this is because it has been forced to wear a mask which is making it sad…and so it must be cancelled.

In San Francisco…the former Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art…he’s been forced to resign based on a petition from change.org…because of his toxic white supremacist beliefs. I looked into this…and despite his supposed white supremacist beliefs the petition doesn’t include any examples. His crime…as stated on “more than one occasion” according to the petition…is that he said that he believed that in the selection of art it was important not to exclude the consideration of art created by white men. In other words…he said that art selection should be color blind…but nope, not good enough for the WAMM and he was forced to resign by the museum.

And this in…from the “Love Columnist” (whatever that is) of the LA Times. If any person declines to date from outside their own race…why then they are…you guessed it…racist. The column was clearly referring to the whites who choose for whatever reason not to date blacks, latinos, indigenous people, or asians…but really? Does everything have to be declared racist and cancelled?

Then there was the guy…in Yorktown NY…anyway he was, according to his statement to police shooting target practice in the hallway of his home with his .22 rifle when one of the bullets went through his wall, across to his neighbor’s house, through her wall, and injured her in her shower. Yeah…Stupid Finds A Way.

And finally…it looks like Mr. Biden has completely gone over to the far progressive stand for the upcoming election. First it was his agreement on a many page manifesto with Mr .Sanders on things that need to be in the platform for the fall. Then it was the trillion dollars he wants to spend in the next 10 years on child care. Now he’s saying he will spend 1.5 trillion in the next 15 years to eliminate all fossil fuel electrical power generation by 2035. Yup…every coal, gas, oil, and nuclear power plant will be shut down…all offshore drilling or extraction from already drilled wells will be stopped…and only carbon free power will be allowed.

There are several major…problems with this idea which comes straight from AOC’s Green New Deal but says we’ll go even faster than she demands.

• It can’t be done without major tax increases and no increase in income tax rates on individuals or corporations will provide enough funds. So they’re going to go with the wealth tax I guess which is (a) patently unconstitutional and (b) would require a massive new government bureaucracy to figure out each year how much your paintings and art were worth so you can have an appropriate amount of your wealth confiscated…again plainly unconstitutional even assuming a government bureaucracy could figure it out.
• There is simply no means of carbon free electricity generation available in the current or near term that can provide the amount of power needed. There are few remaining places where hydroelectric can be built and while wind and solar can provide some power they can only really be located in adequate numbers in central and south central states…but there is no distribution system currently built that can get that much power from where it is generated to where it is needed. Yes…additional transmission systems can be built but it is just not technically feasible to completely rebuild the US electrical grid in 15 years…not to mention build all new power generation facilities.

So…either the plan is complete bovine end product (or BEP which is a more polite way to say BS and if you don’t know what BS means go google it) or our friends in the Democrat party are lying to us. Me…I’m going with both answers.

Interesting things found on the net.

This guy won 95 million dollars in the Jamaican lottery…and by law down there you have to show up and collect your winnings in person. However…numerous jackpot winners have been robbed over the years so while he had to give his name W. Brown seems pretty innocuous so he decided to make sure nobody knew what he actually looked like.

This isn’t really a comment for or against masks…they provide some protection against an infected-but-asymptomatic you from infecting other people and a lesser amount of protection against another infected person giving it to you…but if they’re such a great idea…then why does the box of ear loop masks specifically say that they won’t protect against CoViD?

Yeah…I know it’s just legalese BEP…but if masks were such a panacea and always worked as the WAMM says…why the warning?

And finally…there’s a lot to be said for this idea.

Cyas.