Or actually…what are they not thinking.

I swear…when you get into politics, government, media or pretty much anything else that attracts media attention these days…you must have to get a lobotomy, forget everything you know about how things work, and just spout whatever line you want. Doesn’t matter which party or which level of government or media…people are just plain not thinking.

Around the old home front though…we had a 2 day trip up to Umitilla FL (northwest of Orlando) for the Elks Quarterly Meeting that Connie had to attend and Neil went along for a Friday morning drive around Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive and he actually has some images for me to post in a bit. Our reservation for a king bed room at the Comfort Inn in Tavares got hosed up…probably because they were fully booked and we got there about 2100 at night after a Sarasota Orchestra chamber music concert on the way. We ended up with a dual queen bed room rather than the king bed we had reserved…and Connie was all kind of PO’ed over that…the front desk basically said we’re full and don’t care. She’s right though…if you reserve and pay for a king bed they ought not to give it away to whoever wanders in off the street. Just tell them you’re out of king beds since you’ve already reserved one for those people smart enough to make a reservation ahead of time.

Other than that…not much else is new. We had our annual Medicare appointments and they told Connie to eat fewer carbs. So we’re eating a lot more salads and veggies and trying to eat less sweet stuff and cut down on taters and pasta. She’s lost a couple pounds already and Neil needs to check and see if he has as well. 

She’s off to chorus practice tonight…and has a concert of the Bruckner Mass Saturday and Sunday after next…Neil got a ticket for the Sunday matinee. They’ve got a dress rehearsal before the Saturday evening performance and parking there is a bit limited so she’ll go on her own on Saturday and they’ll go together on Sunday…probably eat dinner on the way home afterwards rather than come home and cook.

OK, let’s get on to the various stupidities…in the interest of brevity I won’t bother posting the link to the news article but all of these are from the last couple of days.

Up in NC…the governor is pissed that the legislature passed over the previous governor’s veto a couple of bills limiting the governor’s power. Now the new governor is suing the legislature because according to him he was elected governor and thus the people want him to have the powers that were taken away and because the legislature made a “partisan” decision. Sure…it was a partisan decision but that’s politics for you. The legislature passed the bills, the governor vetoed them, and they overrode his veto…because that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Partisan doesn’t mean bad…it just means operating by the parties principles…and of course passing those bills over the veto is certainly partisan…but they’re still duly passed law. Just because he doesn’t like it doesn’t make it illegal.

The President’s killing of USAID, stopping all federal payments, giving Musk access to various computer systems, and banning birthright citizenship have all been place on hold by the courts. We’ll let the legal brouhaha play out…but fi it eventually gets to the SCOTUS, especially on the citizenship thing…it’s likely going to be a 9-0 vote against him. Yes…I know they’re conservative justices…and that liberals are convinced that they will give him whatever he wants…but they’re wrong. Conservative justices read the wording in the Constitution for what it says…not what they want it to mean…and born in the US and subject to our jurisdiction (which means the parents can be arrested and prosecuted) is what the 14th amendment says…so it’s going nowhere.

Out in Idaho…the city of Boise converted a park with some tennis courts over to pickleball courts…probably because it’s a popular game these days and takes less athletic skill, strength, and ease of movement than tennis. But the folks in the article are suing the city over the decision because of…the noise from the courts which has an “especially intruding quality” leaving them “tortured” and as a result they’ve incurred $1.6 million in losses due to the value of their property and psychological injuries related to the noise. Frankly…we think they are someplace off the reservation. We have picket ball courts in our neighborhood and they are maybe 50 yards from our house. We leave the windows open if all possible because we like fresh air…and while we can occasionally hear the players hitting the ball…it’s less of an intrusion than traffic noise and mostly we don’t notice it. 

There’s this idiot politician…or is that redundant…who claims that “Muslims don’t belong in America”. He claims that Islam exists “for the sole purpose of conquering Christendom and ending the Jewish people” (obviously completely bogus) and, therefore “they” do not belong in America. Doesn’t care if they are citizens, born here, converts, or whatever…Muslims “don’t belong here”.

Out in the PRC…one of their legislators is working on a ballot initiative to allow the state to secede from the union. Seems to me that the Civil War essentially wrote the law on that and anyway the SCOTUS after the war was over ruled that joining the United States was not revocable.

And it’s not just in the US…over in the UK there is a woman who was in a hospital bed for 550 days with a diagnosis of bacterial infection. She’s been medically cleared for release most of that time but the system (remember they have socialized nationalized medical care…so be careful what you wish for)…and the system has been unable to find a suitable place for her to be moved to. Nonetheless…she was evicted from her hospital room, arrested, and moved to some other facility which may or may not (the article doesn’t say) be suitable for her needs.

Getting back to the mess in DC…Representative Rabin has introduced the Birthright Citizenship Act which “ensures that U.S. citizenship is granted only to children born in America who have at least one parent who is a citizen, lawful permanent resident, or serving in our Armed Forces.”. Now let’s ignore the obvious idea that this would violate the 14 amendment…but this guy thinks that he can introduce a bill to change the constitution. There is a way to change the constitution…but news flash…introducing legislation is specifically ally *not* the way to make it happen. That requires an amendment and that needs 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress and 3/4 of the states. Amending the constitution is admittedly hard…but it was specifically designed to be hard…to eliminate the idea that a small majority could change it. 

A judge today (or maybe yesterday) issued a decision that basically said the administration was required to spend money that Congress had authorized and appropriated. Nonetheless…both Mr. Musk and the VP said that the judiciary had no right to overrule the “legitimate powers of the executive”. Seems to me…and I know that Vance went to law school…the courts are part of that whole 3 co-equal branches thing and ever since Marbury vs Madison the SCOTUS has been and will continue to be the arbiter of what powers the other two branches have…its that whole checks and balances thing. The admin needs to go back and reread the Impoundment Act which makes it mandatory that the Executive branch spend the money that the Legislative branch approved based on their powers under the constitution. 

Now…that doesn’t mean that we should just spend more…both parties have been spending like drunken sailors for decades and we as a country have a budget deficit and debt problem…and it needs to get fixed…but this is the wrong way to do it.

Let me tell you a little story…there was this guy named Clinton who was President a while back…you may have heard of him. He ran on a platform that he would balance the budget so after he was inaugurated he had his VP head up a commission to figure out how to do that and once they were done legislation was introduced to achieve the goal…and ya know…it worked. He had several balanced budgets during his time in office and he went about doing it the right way. Mr. Musk and the President are right…we do need to cut spending but in reality we probably also need to increase revenue since the majority of federal spending is mandatory under previously passed laws. While we like tax cuts as well as the next guy and while it’s also true that the high earners pay the vast majority of the federal income…and it’s also true that lower earners pay less…the old “the rich just need to pay their fair share” argument is just BS. Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders want a wealth tax…not an income tax…but they’ll need a constitutional amendment to do that…and even if they get one the federal government is no more qualified to administer and collect it than they are able to deport 11 million or whatever illegal immigrants. Neither of those goals is achievable…as is going to Mars anytime soon or ridding ourselves of fossil fuels. But…Congress has the power of the purse and they need to figure out how to balance the budget. Idiotic tariffs or unconstitutional wealth taxes aren’t the answer…it would require a hard, concerted effort by both sides and anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature should realize that with 2 parties and their differing goals some compromises in both spending and revenue are the *only* way this problem gets resolved. Unfortunately…in today’s political environment compromise with the other side is a dirty word and usually a death sentence for your political career as the radicals on both the left and right will primary any legislator who dares to work with the other side…and since it’s the fringes that vote in primaries the reasonable politicians will get voted out and we’ll get another election that turns out not to be a vote for the best person but a vote for the least bad person…and that’s a hell of a way to run a railroad as the old saying goes.

Senator Klobuchar has called for bipartisan working with the other side…which 40 years ago was pretty common but is apparently a not allowed thing today. After her call…Salon had an article that says there is “no common ground with fascists”.

One thing that might not be stupid…the President has ordered the mint to stop producing pennies since they cost about 3 cents to make…and in actuality a nickel costs about 14 cents to make. This has the left all up in arms…again…because Congress has the power to define currency. That’s perfectly correct…and the President’s order does not eliminate the penny as currency…they’re still legal tender (just as they are in Canada although production of them has ceased there as well)…he’s just ordered the minting of them to be stopped. Speaking personally…we think that both the penny and nickel should be abolished and federal legislation passed that the price after tax be rounded up or down to the nearest 10 cents and that’s what gets charged…or alternatively make that true for cash transactions and leave the penny and nickel in effect for non cash transactions (this is what they do in Canada and the UK). Heck…if we only want to eliminate the penny just start making nickels out of the same material as the penny but the size of a nickel and that will cut down the cost of making them as well.

I get the whole cutting spending and eliminating waste idea…and the argument about necessary vs unnecessary spending needs to happen…along with the how do we increase revenue as part of the solution since cutting spending significantly is impossible unless we eliminate the mandated spending requirements in law and that’s simply not an achievable goal for either side. 

Finally…and I don’t have the link for this one…there was a TikTok video that contrasted a couple of women in what happened if you left a political party…the two women went through what happened if both were red or both were blue. If both were red…the one said she wasn’t a Republican any more because her beliefs no longer were the same as theirs. The other one agreed that they could still be friends and discuss things since they had known each other since the 3rd grade. Then they pretended the one was leaving the Democrat party…and the other one responded “so you’ve become a racist, fascist pig”. The one leaving said again…we’ve known each other since the 3rd grade and I’m the same person I always was…the other one said “I have a policy of not being friends with Nazis. Given our current political polarization and looking at it from a mostly towards the center viewpoint…there’s a lot of truth in that video.

Ok…that’s enough of that for today…these morons need to actually remember what they were taught in Civics class or read the constitution or whatever is needed…they don’t get to unilaterally change things just because they say so.

OK…let’s have some images…but we’re going to have a little quiz today. Rather than label every image…Ima gonna let you see how much you’ve learned from my previous posts and you get to identify them. I’ll label them with a number and tell you at the bottom what the actual answers are.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 

6. Flight sequence…she was brining back some nesting material.

7.

8. This is a new one you may not have seen posted here before.

9.

10.

11.

I think it spotted Neil.

12.

Ok…got all your guises written down? Here’s the key and I’ll let you grade yourself.

1. Great Egret (black legs and yellow/green bill)

2. Red Winged Blackbird Male (red/yellow swatches on the wing roots)

3. Moorhen

4. Great Blue Heron (or GHB as we call it)

5. Anhinga Male (species dives for food and perches with wings spread to dry them out).

6. Osprey (sometimes called a Fish Eagle although that is actually a different species in Africa). Could be either gender…they’re identical in appearance and size and both bring back nesting material so no hints there.

7. Anhinga Female (brown breast/neck)

8. Gray Headed Swamp Hen (I am not sure I’ve ever posted one of these before so…)

9. Red Winged Blackbird Male

10. Bald Eagle…our national bird. Based on size this is probably a female

11. Snowy Egret (golden slippers and black bill)

12. Red Shouldered Hawk (reddish on breast/shoulder/wing root). This is probably a female since it was bringing nesting material back.

So…how did you do on identification? Let me know in the comments.

Interesting things found on the net.

Only in Japan…their culture is markedly different from western society. They’re one of the few countries that are allowed to domestically produce (final assembly anyway) the F-35 fighter and this is the first one they finished. So…naturally…they got a Shinto priest to bless it.

Cyas.