Category: Quote O’ The Day

Without weighing in on whether changing Election Day is a good or bad idea (I think it’s not a good one, for irrelevant reasons), I offer the following observations regarding some of the rhetoric over the President’s tweet that raised the possibility.

The Constitution places in Congress the power to set the date for choosing electors. (Art. II, Sec. 1, 4th para.). Congress has, by statute, set that date as the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. 3 U.S. Code § 1. Congress can amend that statute at any time (subject to filibuster, veto, override, and all the usual legislative hurdles). [NOTE: Each state can begin the process earlier than that First Tuesday, and many do – allowing early absentee or mail voting to begin quite a bit earlier. More recently, other state-governed election schedules have already been changed and/or litigated due to Covid-19 concerns. I don’t know of anyone who has suggested that those actual or proposed modifications to election schedules are either fascistic or impeachable.]

The Constitution not only allows, but requires, that the President “shall from time to time . . . recommend to [the Congress’s] Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” (Art. II, Sec. 3.)

Moreover, the President does not, upon taking office, lose his rights under the First Amendment either to “the freedom of speech” or “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Neither performing his Constitutional duty (Art. II, Sec. 3) nor exercising his Constitutional rights (1st Amend.) constitutes “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” (the sole basis for impeachment). (Art. II, 4.) Nor is either one of those “fascistic,” by any rational definition of that over-used term.

Atty Steve Matthews

“Imagine the staggering, historically unprecedented, Space Age prosperity – economic and technological – that American capitalism must have ushered in over the last few decades, to enable this kind of simply dumb decadence to take hold and continue.”—Omri Ceren

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” Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah “Evita” Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.
You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand “Palin Power.” A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections — but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control.”–Naomi Wolf

She’s a demoncrap apparatchik talking about Sarah Palin back in 2008.
12 years later and it reads like it’s right out of their playbook with SloJoe.
Strange that………

I just realized that his honor has probably read Starship Troopers

“My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime usually do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late.  The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed- Where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”
— Judge Alex Kozinski

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.”
— Robert Heinlein

“I would never wish for the death of anyone, that being said, there are some obituaries I have read with a great deal of pleasure.” —Mark Twain

“If Trump is a Hatemongering, Evil, Racist and a Nazi, then why aren’t his followers the ones Killing Cops, Destroying Statues, Looting Stores and Assaulting Innocent Bystanders?”-–Kimberly1

“A lot of people who never noticed are noticing that the government is made up of idiots and nothing happens if you break their rules.”

Post-Pandemic Americans May Be Done With Taking Orders
Governments overplayed their hands with mandates that they are losing the ability to enforce.

On June 19, the mayor of Cottonwood, Arizona, unilaterally ordered city residents to wear face masks in public places. A week later, my family went downtown to grab some lunch at a favorite barbecue joint. The proclamation might as well have never been issued; we were among the very few people wearing masks on the street or in the stores.

The residents of Cottonwood aren’t alone; compliance with orders from on-high is losing popularity across the country. One of the COVID-19 pandemic’s legacies may well be an overwhelming public fatigue with being told what to do.

Continue reading “”

“The same Karens who were calling the cops on you for not social distancing are now out in crowds carrying signs saying Abolish Police in ‘solidarity.’ We live in deeply serious, deeply unserious times.”

“Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in possession and under our direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?” — Patrick Henry

Atlanta Protesters Graffiti, Smash Windows at CNN Headquarters

Protests over the death of George Floyd have taken a destructive turn in downtown Atlanta.

Shortly before 5:30 p.m., some type of scuffle happened between a protester and an Atlanta police officer right outside the CNN Center along Centennial Olympic Drive.

Police formed a barricade and kept protesters at bay right for quite a while and then the protesters took a destructive turn. Shortly after 8 p.m., protesters started smashing the doors of the CNN. Then they moved to parked police cruisers and began jumping on the cars, smashing the windows and eventually set a police cruiser on fire.

This comes after protesters peacefully marched from Centennial Olympic Park to the state Capitol, and then back. The tense moments came as it appeared protesters started leaving Centennial Olympic Park.

Quote O’ The Day and winner of the Freudian Slip Award

“….I think that the dangerous – you know – edges here are that he’s trying to undermine the media. Trying to make up his own facts. And it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsens he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think. And that is the, that is our job.”

 

“Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of “emergency”. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini. In the collectivist sweep over a dozen minor countries of Europe, it was the cry of men striving to get on horseback. And “emergency” became the justification of the subsequent steps. This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains.” – President Herbert Hoover

The forgoing bringing this to mind:

A 9th Circuit dissent by Judge Alex Kozinski:

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that “speech, or . . . the press” also means the Internet, see Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844 (1997), and that “persons, houses, papers, and effects” also means public telephone booths, see Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases —or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. See, e.g., Compassion in Dying v. Washington, 79 F.3d 790 (9th Cir. 1996) (en banc), rev’d sub nom. Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702 (1997). But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we’re none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it’s using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.