Slamland 2

Lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown refused to allocate state funds for an early presidential primary. This is from the LA Times and the discussion is here.

We bought a ticket in the nosebleed section because Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature refused to spend an estimated $100 million for a separate presidential primary early in the nominating process

Instead, they combined presidential balloting with the regular state primary on June 5, long after the Republican nomination surely will have been nailed down, most likely by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

That means Republican voters in the nation’s most populous state will probably have no voice in whom the party nominates for president. They can only shout a meaningless cheer or catcall. — Los Angeles Times

— Wait a hold it! Full tilt STOP! —

What’s wrong with this picture? There is no provision in the US Constitution for primary elections! Primary elections only provide the means to falsely propagate the the tyranny of the two-party system. Why should any state support ANY primary with scarce tax dollars? Each party should have and fund its own primary, should they even need one. I challenge anyone to find one sentence, in the US Constitution, that supports the concept of primary elections!

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

Prosecutors and police are largely held immune from their faulty actions, not even compensating for the direct harm of their actions. My previous article on Mr. Morton, a man falsely imprisoned for 25 years, is but the tip of this iceberg. At the core of this is prosecutorial immunity and it needs to end.

The article is here and the discussions are there.

Once released, those arrested have little recourse. State and federal laws generally protect law enforcement agencies from lawsuits over such detentions as long as officers were acting on a valid warrant and had a reasonable belief that they were arresting the right person.

The problem is that these people, innocent victims, are not compensated or even returned to their homes. In the case of a Nissan customer service supervisor who was hauled by authorities from Tennessee to L.A. County on a local sex-crimes warrant meant for someone with a similar name. How did he get back home to Tennessee?

The worst of these was the case of Santiago Ibarra Rivera who wound up spending a month in jail, that’s a month’s loss of salary, probably lost his job, and all that he gets from Superior Court Judge Kathryn Solórzano is an apology.  Pardon me for thinking that as being a lot short of the mark. He is owed at the least, lost wages and a free ride back home.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

The sale of the world-famous Chrystal Cathedral to the Orange County diocese of the Roman Catholic Church is really showing just how many foreigners have moved in since the 60’s. These are people that have no sense of history of the place that they moved to and Nicole Santa Cruz shows her ignorance, as well as that fact that she was a less than indifferent student in primary school.

When Brown succeeded Bishop Norman McFarland in 1998, there were 600,000 Catholics in Orange County. There are now 1.2 million.

That growth is not so much an increase in market-share rather, it represents an huge increase in population. There was a time when the entire Southland was 100% Roman Catholic. It was largely after the conquest by Colonel Fremont and the influx of gold prospectors, in 1849, that Protestantism took root. The Church has always been strong, even when it played low-profile in the light of the protestant conquerors from the eastern seaboard.

While I no longer consider myself a Catholic, I was raised in the diocese of Orange. This is really a resurgence of Catholicism and not a growth.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

This video got my attention

About the Republic of the USA

It is also extremely worrisome. In the various forums, it is amazing how many people do not know that the US is a Republic and guaranteed to remain so by the US Constitution. The majority of them are Democrats.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

I commented on yet another LA Times article today. The main article is here.

"These kids got it," he said. "They understood the framework that was being laid out — that Hispanics are the oppressed and Caucasians are the oppressors. That’s very troubling." — Supt. John Huppenthal, Tucson Unified School District

The thing is that, this is nothing less than the truth. The entire Southwest was conquered by the US in the late 1800’s as a part of the Monroe Doctrine. Before then it was a part, a very valuable part, of Mexico. It was conquered through mass illegal immigration by US settlers, which gave the pretext for the Cavalry to invade in order to ‘protect’ those illegal settlers. It was exactly the same strategy used to conquer Texas and later on, Hawaii. After the conquest, the US engaged in systematic denigration and suppression of the native population that carries on to the present day, as evidenced by the Tucson law. A very large part of that was the systematic genocide of native Americans, the American Indian (Indians), by the US Cavalry. Former Mexican Nationals were not treated much better as they were largely of mixed Spanish and Indian blood.

This summer, Huppenthal drew fire after suggesting similarities between the program and the Hitler Youth. Huppenthal said the remarks were made on "an academic basis" and misunderstood.

He no longer draws the comparison, he said, because it is too inflammatory. But in an interview, he said, "The thing that Hitler did was he used perceptions of historical injustice, he cast them in racial terms, and then he also referred to the Sudetenland as a stolen land — that’s the parallel."

The Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American studies program does nothing other than to teach the truth. To outlaw the truth is yet another case of repression and since they are now fourth and fifth generation Americans, they are also US citizens. Must they be continuously conquered?

Huppenthal replied that curriculum must reach a standard that all Arizonans can be proud of. "I’d ask those people who have challenged me, have they really met that standard over the last couple years?"

The thing is that there are things in US history that no American should be proud of and remembering those things might prevent their re-occurrence. The US has done many shameful things and a part of the healing is to admit to doing them and at least to try and make some reparation. Teaching the true history is one of them.

Land of the free and the home of the brave? This really makes me, and everyone else wonder. I am not that proud of being an American with this crap going on.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

Actually, there is law prohibiting smoking in a car with children. Read it for yourself.

I commented heavily.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

My first article that isn’t on my own blog I am thrilled! I have never considered submitting anywhere before. They took the article substantially as written, with some minor grammar changes. Considering that I only wrote it in two days, that is significant, I feel.

Now, what to do about the next article?

theglensaid weekly and I’ll stick to that

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

In the US there is no true difference between a Conservative and a Liberal. In the US, a la Webster’s, a conservative is simply one who resists change. Do NOT apply this equally to political and moral conservatism. The are NOT the same, however much the Religious Right likes to conflate the two.

A political conservative is someone, like myself, that seeks to resist changes to the US Constitution, which is still the single most liberal political document ever written and enacted.

The Religious Right seeks to change the US Constitution, or it’s interpretation, to suit Puritan moral values. That makes them radicals, by definition. Radical is not Conservatism. To a true Constitutional Conservative, the Radical Social-Religious Right is anti-Liberty and therefore anathema. We must defend our holy document from such heresy as DOMA and Prohibition¹ . The War on Drugs is a tool of the Puritanical Religious Right.

I am Constitutionally an extreme conservative but socially, I am also a bit of a Liberal because the US Constitution is. Puritan moral values and social mores are incompatible with the US Constitution. In short, you cannot be both an American and a religious moralist.

Too many call themselves conservative when they are actually religious moralists. We cannot fight the enemy as long as our terms are confused. Allowing the Religious Right to also call themselves the Political Right is conceding the war to the enemy, let alone the battle. It’s allowing wolves to call themselves sheep dogs. This is what has been happening to the GOP for years now. Palin and the Tea Party would like nothing more than to shred a document that they do not understand and do not even want to read, the US Constitution.

Remember during this election that the Political Right is NOT the same as the Moral or Religious Right and they will be trying to confuse us all by conflating the two.

1. Note precisely that, there is no mention of banning substances or even controlling them in the US Constitution and before the amendments on alcohol, such were even considered unconstitutional. Most US Founding Fathers would today be in jail as drug users and abusers. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

1. Second round of Quantitative Easing will cease on schedule.¹

Amid increasing political pressure and turbulent financial conditions in the world economy, the Federal Reserve is letting its massive bond-buying stimulus program expire in the next few days without a new initiative to prop up the weak American recovery.

Why we can’t afford more war.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday the "explosive path" of the nation’s public debt would exceed 100% of GDP by 2021, even with expected policy changes.

On the Tea Party’s move towards austerity

On the U.S. budget, Bernanke said he didn’t think that sharp, immediate cuts in the deficit would create more jobs, as some Republican and other advocates for belt-tightening have argued.

"In the very short run," he said, "the fiscal tightening is … at best neutral, but probably somewhat negative for job creation."

So, that’s one hit.

2. US risks default on its debt!²

Neither side reported an alignment in positions about raising the nation’s debt ceiling, an unsettled issue that could force the government to default on its obligations by early August.

This is Repugnicans and Demorats playing chicken with our lives and economy. Strangely, neither side is pointing out that it was GW Bush’s policies that got us here. However, it is the ignorant yokels from the Tea Party that is keeping the rest of the GOP from helping to find the brakes. Some of them are even considering letting the US default for 30 days or so, as a tactical play. What fools we elect to congress these days!

Some Republican lawmakers have said a brief default, which would be inevitable in August if lawmakers fail to raise the nation’s $14.3-trillion debt ceiling, might be acceptable if it forces the White House to deal with large budget deficits.

The problem with that plan is that it isn’t Obama that sets the budget. According to the US Constitution, the budget is set in the US House of Representative and nowhere else. The US House is in Republican hands at the moment.

In 2003, when I came here to Switzerland, it cost about 1.20 CHF to buy a dollar. That same dollar now only costs 84 centimes, or 0.842CHF! The mighty are falling as I write this.

1. This round of quantitative easing expires at the end of June. [↩]
2. The debt ceiling must be raised by early August or the US goes into default. [↩]

Mirrored from The Slamlander.

On the LA Times re: Gay judge wasn’t required to remove himself from same-sex marriage case, U.S. judge rules

A commenter named Ann Common said: “What we hate is sexual perversion.”

This is my response:

And now the truth is revealed! You are a hater. It may interest you to know that Victorian modes and culture [should have] died with Queen Victoria, the Hannover Queen. Wrapping yourself in a time-bubble will not change that.

I am not gay but I am a product of the 60′s, when my generation rejected puritan rules and the senseless taboos of the prohibitionistas who were in power at that time. Remember the California Communes?

"Signs, signs, everywhere there’re signs. blocking up the scenery, blowing my mind. Don’t do this or that, can’t you read the signs?"

Perversion is in the eye of the beholder, or not, as the case may be. Some think that a woman simply showing her face in public is a perversion. They even think that it causes earthquakes.

I am perfectly willing to let you believe in whatever you want but it is un-American to let you impose those beliefs on everyone else. We are NOT a Christian country, we are a Secular one, as evidenced by the First Amendment to the Constitution, and I reject the Religious Right, with fervor!

I relegate your Christian God to the same dark pit with the Muslim Allah; may they fondle each other forever, while humans get on with the business of humans, without their interference. I reject your rules that judge what is perversion and I reject your values as being un-American!

Families are supposed to love and support each other. Rejecting and oppressing such families simply because of your warped sense of perversion is the hallmark of a religiously repressive regime and not that of a free country. The only thing that we should be intolerant of is intolerance.

BTW, I have probably been a Republican longer than you’ve been alive and I reject the Religious Right/Moral Majority of Buchannan, Ford, and Quayle.

Mirrored from The Slamlander.