Month: April 2016

 
From Max’s Dad:

Being a strict constitutionalist is a bitch these days. Why, every time you turn around there’s a mob of libtards trying to take a dump on the constitution and oppress the very people who love this nation so much they cry at the very sight of an eagle.

What I’m talking about of course is voting. The Founding Fathers made it very very clear that voting was a right. A right. A right almost as important as being able to own guns, Almost. But these so called progressives (and we all know that’s a PC term for godless commies) for some reason seem to think that voting is for everyone when the FF’s certainly did not intend it to be for everyone.

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Raymond: An odd mixture of insane tragedy and guilty mirth.
 
From PZ Myers at Pharyngula:

You never know what nefarious activity might be associated with your IP address — as it turns out, companies that try to map the physical locations of computers and electronic devices have a crude workaround for searches that don’t return a valid location. They instead return a default location, which is the geographic center of the country or state or county. The problem is that sometimes there are people living there, and suddenly the police trying to trace a stolen laptop are knocking on your door with a search warrant.

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In response to jobanger’s In Defense Of The Democratic Party’s Delegate Process

The delegate process works for the good of the party, and is not unfair to any Democratic candidate — and it does not need to be changed. Also, giving the super delegates an automatic slot at the national convention opens up more slots for rank-and-file Democrats to be able to go to the convention…

(quoting Kevin Kelton at examiner.com)

…So Democrats, stop trying to change the rules mid-game. If you don’t trust your own Democratic senator or congressman to have a single delegate vote out of the 4,765 at the Convention, then you aren’t a Democrat.

– jobsanger, April 5, 2016

What an awful case for the superdelegates.

If the Sanders supporters’ argument is that the system is designed to support the establishment, then pointing out that the superdelegates are composed of establishment politicians only helps their point.

Obama’s victory over Clinton does not mean that nothing is wrong with the system.

Lines like “In short, they know this stuff far better than the average once-every-four-years primary voter” and “The presidency is not a popularity contest” are exactly the sorts of condescension that people concerned about the democratic process expect to hear from the establishment.

That only a few (dozen) superdelegates are lobbyists does not mean that they are not a problem.

Kelton even ends by accusing liberals of not really being Democrats. That’s really not how Democrats should be treating such a substantial and liberal portion of their base.

I don’t even disagree with the central argument for the superdelegates: that they are the people with actual experience in politics and that popularity isn’t everything. But this article as a whole is just fuel for the fire of those who want a more purely democratic system.

Ryan can also be found at Secular Ethics, a site devoted to the application of reason to ethical behavior.
 

 
From Michael John Scott at MadMikesAmerica:

Why did humans become monogamous, apparently rejecting the promiscuity that is natural to most animals?

Was it morality? Religion? Maybe love?

The answer is germs, researchers said Tuesday…

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From Tommy Christopher at Mediaite:

President Obama granted Fox News Sunday its first interview with him since becoming president, and it quickly became apparent why that was. Host Chris Wallace took the interview from a tough but fair grilling about the Hillary Clinton email “scandal” to a badgering and yellow interrogation that laid the groundwork for post-email conspiracy theorizing. Wallace asked the reasonable question of whether Hillary Clinton will be treated the same as anyone else by the FBI and the Justice Department, but when he asked it an unreasonable five times, President Obama lost patience with him:

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From Jon Perr at PERRspectives:

In an understandably rare interview with Fox News on Sunday, Barack Obama spoke bluntly about the “worst mistake” of his presidency. That error, as he had also recently explained to the BBC and The Atlantic, was the unraveling of Libya following the fall of Muammar Qaddafi:

“Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.”

Whatever you think of that answer, Obama’s mea culpa stands in stark contrast to that of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. To the extent he could even think of a single mistake he had made, President Bush cited only his “bad language.”

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From Rabbi Ben Kamin at The Moderate Voice:

Years ago, my elder daughter Sari, now a creative professional in New York, found herself once again treated like a vassal while working in the highly-pressurized, grueling environment of the city’s restaurants. Never one to shun hard labor and long hours, she and her fellow servers routinely steeled themselves against the often dismissive, arrogant, and boorish attitudes of their customers.

We have lost touch with the humanity of those who service us.

The elitist conduct of her patrons, too-often alcohol-driven and underwritten by entitlement, sometimes made my daughter and her colleagues feel less-than-human and invisible.

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From Manifesto Joe at Texas Blues:

At 74 going on 75, he’s too old to run for president. He’s a rumpled old senator from a small state, and the only avowed socialist in the Congress since Ron Dellums retired. He’s an unremarkable speaker with a heavy New York accent. And he’s unlikely to win the Democratic nomination for president even if he does well in forthcoming primaries, because the party machinery (soft delegates) has pretty much decided that Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee.

So why is Bernie Sanders doing this well? It’s simple.

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From Dave Dubya at Freedom Rants:

We’re seeing a lot of Thomas Sowell’s “Whine of the Wealthy” thrown in our faces, “I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”

Who has made these claims? No one was quoted or cited supporting these assertions. It’s a straw man, of course, a favorite fantasy adversary of the far Right. That fact doesn’t matter, does it? It is framed to appeal to emotion, rather than reason. Liberals want to take your hard-earned money and give it to the lazy undeserving poor.

Maybe Sowell and his parrots should first try to understand why they make such a statement.

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From Green Eagle:

Can there be anything more touching than Paul Ryan’s selfless declaration that he is not running for President? Unless it is the utterly uncritical acceptance of his claim by the entirety of the mainstream press, despite the fact that he played this exact same Brer Rabbit game on them less than a year ago…

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