Alabama

In 2011, Alabama passed a Voter ID law, requiring all voters to have an approved photo ID.

This month, in what is no doubt a completely unrelated coincidence, Alabama will close most of the motor vehicle offices in the poorest areas of the state.  This includes 8 of the 10 counties with the most minority voters and all of the counties where African Americans comprise 75% or more of the voting population.

It’s a good thing that the Supreme Court said that racism is fixed.  Otherwise, somebody like me might get the wrong idea.

Priorities

Let’s say these three statements applied to you, and you were asked to rank them in order of importance:

“I am a United States Congressman”

“I am a life-long devout Catholic”

“I am a conservative Republican”

Which would you likely put at the top?  If you’re Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ), the answer is “I’m a conservative Republican.”

Despite being both a life-long Catholic — a graduate of a Jesuit college — and a member of the Government of the United States, Rep Gosar opted not to attend the Pope’s Congressional address.

Basically, according to Gosar, God already had His chance to speak His mind.  It’s called the Bible.  And no Vicar of Christ is going to tell Gosar something that he knows in his gut is not true.

“But when the Pope chooses to act and talk like a leftist politician, then he can expect to be treated like one.”

Gosar thinks the Pope should stick to strictly religious issues, like demonizing homosexuals and denying women health care, and stay away from political issues like helping the less-fortunate and preserving the Earth for future generations.

Prices

When I go to the airport, I normally park in the $10/day lot. A bus driver meets me at the entrance, guides me to an open parking spot, helps me with my bags, gives me a little slip of paper with my parking spot number on it (to give the driver when I return), asks me which airline he should drop me off at, and if I’m really unlucky, he will tell me he’s going to pick up somebody else, so I should wait a few minutes. When we get to the terminal, the driver will unload the bags. All that for $10/day plus a tip.

Yesterday I got to the aiport and the $10/day lot was full. So I had to go to the $12/day lot. I had to find my own parking spot. I had to write down my parking spot number. I had to figure out where the shuttle bus stop was. I had to drag my own bags there. I had to wait for the bus to arrive. I got on the bus at Stop 4, so the bus was packed when it got there. I had to load my own bags onto the bus. The bus stopped at every airport entrance, whether people were going there or not. At my stop, I had to unload my own bags. This was $12/day.

I must be missing something.

Equal Rights

Just to recap …

Kim Davis is a County Clerk in Kentucky who says that her religious views gives her the right to deny marriage licenses to same-sex couples.  Ms. Davis has a number of people who agree with her and are supporting her, both morally and financially.

Good news.

Charee Stanley is a flight attendant.  Her Muslim faith demands that she not serve alcohol.  Her employer, ExpressJet, has suspended her for her failure to perform her job duties.

I’m sure Ms. Davis’s supporters would be happy to help Ms. Stanley fight for her religious rights to get paid for a job she refuses to do.  Right?

Fourteen

(Once again, this was much shorter in my head.)

The Fourteenth Amendment has been in the news a lot lately. As it turns out, for completely unrelated reasons, the Fourteenth Amendment happens to be one of my favorites. So let’s talk about it.

I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a legal scholar. I’m not a Constitutional scholar. I’m just somebody who considers himself a reasonably smart person.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

I don’t understand why some people think that illegal immigrants are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Even ignoring the fact that illegal immigration is a civil offense and not a criminal offense, violating a law does not mean you aren’t subject to its jurisdiction. I get on the highway and violate the speed limit, but I could not argue that I am not subject to the jurisdiction of the State Police when they give me a ticket.

The Supreme Court has recognized three specific classes of people who are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States:

1. Native Americans who live on reservations, do not pay income taxes, and are citizens of their tribal nations rather than of the United States, are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. They (rather, their parents) had the option to accept or decline U. S. citizenship.

2. Foreign diplomats. “Diplomatic Immunity” is the very essence of not being subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

3. Invading armies.

Illegal immigrants? Guess what — that’s already been addressed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark . His parents were illegal immigrants, he was born in the United States, and the court declared him to be a citizen. That was in 1898.

Finally, as much as I’ve tried to avoid politics in my blog, we should listen to some of the people who want the job of “preserv[ing], protect[ing] and defend[ing] the Constitution of the United States.” They seem to talk a lot about changing it. But if somebody wants to take an oath to “faithfully execute the Office of the President,” then perhaps he should read the Constitution.

There are two groups of people who can propose Constitutional amendments — Congress (two thirds of both houses) and the States (two thirds of them). Amendments take effect when they are ratified by the States (three fourths of them). I don’t see the President listed anywhere.

Finally, there is another aspect to the Fourteenth Amendment, which carries over into the Dream Act(s) in many states. Children, minors, and newborn babies do not come to the United States of their own free will. The term is “Custodial”. The same way that a person who dies in police custody is the responsibility of the police, a minor in the custody of a parent or guardian is the responsibility of that parent.

Something about the “Sins of the Father,” but I’m not a Biblical scholar either.

The other guy

Somebody, somewhere, went home and told this story to his wife.

So I was driving to work today, and I came up the road approaching my building. So I pulled into the left-turn-only lane and slowed down, ready to enter the parking lot. And just when I was about to make my right turn from the left-turn-only lane across the right lane and into the parking lot, the idiot behind me passed me on the right.

I have a feeling I can make a whole blog just with posts like this one. I have another one, but I’ll save it for next week.

Freedom

One day I went into a bookstore cafe. I got to the front of the line, and I was greeted at the counter by an employee covered in facial piercings — eyebrows, nose, cheeks, lips, chin — covered. And I quite literally lost my appetite.  Thank goodness those earlobe-hole-stretching things weren’t a “thing” yet.

Days later, I wished I had said something to somebody about why I had not bought anything.

So what, I hear you asking, about his Free Speech? Doesn’t he have the right to express himself with facial piercings? Yes, yes he does — if her were, in fact, free.

I have this neat thing called a “job”. It’s an agreement with a very large company, where I agree to do what they tell me to do for eight hours, and they agree to give me not-enough money. So during this period of time, am I “free”? No, I am not. I am not free to spend my day shopping; I am not free to watch TV; I am not free to make off-color jokes to my co-workers. These are the rules that I have to follow.

My employer is not violating my rights by telling me “You cannot tell sexual jokes to female employees.” It is a right that I still have, that I choose not to exercise, in deference to a company that gives me money. They ask me not to make racial jokes, and I choose not to exercise that right, because somebody who gives me money asked me nicely. I own lots of tee-shirts that have “four-letter words” on them, and while I have the right to wear them, my company asks me to please wear a plain button-down shirt and a tie. And I do, because they give me money.

A government agent is not free to impose his religious viewpoints on citizens seeking government services. A taxi driver is not free to tell a blind person “No dogs allowed.”

And a person trying to convince me to give him money in exchange for food should not look like he rolled around in a box of safety pins.

I can exercise my freedom all I want, during the periods of time when I can proclaim “I have freedom.” But sometimes I don’t have freedom. Nobody took it from me. Sometimes I freely give it up.

Sensational

(Wow, this ended up much longer than it was in my head.)

Once upon a time, there were three TV networks.  TV Network News was a bond between the Networks — who are required by law to serve the public good — and the People who read a newspaper in the morning and watchted the TV news in the evening.  I will freely admit that, while I am old enough to remember those days, I am not old enough to have experienced them.  My television taste at the time was Bugs Bunny, not Walter Cronkite.

Then in 1976 came the movie Network, a very dark but very funny comedy asking the then-absurd question “What if television news was an entertainment show like the rest of television?” and ended with a television network financing, if not outright owning, a group that we would today call a “domestic terrorist organization.”

Then in 1980 came the Cable News Network, an outlandish idea to have a television channel with nothing but news, all day and all night.

Then along came Don Imus, Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, and countless other media personalities who could be collectively called “Shock Jocks.” They discovered that it’s easy to attract listeners — and, of course, advertising dollars — by being outragous.  They don’t have to be right, and the don’t have to be accurate; they just have to be funny.

Then, along came the Internet.

Today, of course, there is literally boatloads of information to be had without expending even the slightest effort.  The only way to get noticed in the flood is not be the best, not to be the most accurate, but to be first and/or loudest.  The value of being the first one to shout “Hey, look, Planned Parenthood is selling the bodies of dead babaies” is much higher than the value of taking ten minutes to realize “Oh, no, they aren’t.” But Planned Parenthood was not my goal today.  My goal is what some people have called Social Justice Warriors.

Popehat’s Clark, who I always enjoy reading but only rarely agree with, says it better here than I ever could.  But I think the point needs to be driven home.

Today, anybody can be a “media outlet.”  All you really need is a web page and one person who reads it.  But lost forever is the belief that the media supports the common good, seeking to expose the truth and improve society.  Media’s only goal is to increase its own visibility, and it doesn’t matter what — or who — is destroyed in the process.

A college kid says something stupid on his personal Twitter account, and the Internet goes crazy, and the college kicks him out. U. S. Senator Jon Kyl said that “90% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortions,” and the Internet went crazy, but nobody noticed when his office later responded “That was not intended to be a factual statment.”  A teacher loses his job because, using a pen name for anonymity, he wrote a novel about a subject that was deemed inappropriate for a school teacher to write. Another teacher loses her job because, a few years earlier, somebody took a picture of her with a cup in her hand and described the cup “beer”.

This is where the Information Age is taking us.

When you take somebody down, it doesn’t build you up any higher. You’re still just as low as you were originally. It only makes you look higher in comparison.

Unfortunately, “taking somebody down” seems to be the whole point of The Media these days.

Boston

When I was young, and if I wanted to play with a toy, my little sister would invariably want it too.  We would get into an argument, “I want it.” “No, I want it.” “I wanted it first.” “No, I wanted it first.”  Our parents would get annoyed and decide the matter for us, typically in her favor because she was younger, and then she didn’t want it anymore, which would annoy our parents even more.

I don’t know her purpose — did she want it? did she just want to keep me from having it? did she only want it because i wanted it?

The US Olympic Committee was looking for a city to bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics.  Four cities were in competition.  Boston won.  Having won the competition, Boston decided they don’t want to host the Olympics after all.  The USOC will probably not have a chance to select another city, and instead will probably not bid for the 2024 Olympics.

Boston effectively prevented the other three cities from even having a chance at hosting the Olympics by insisting on having something it didn’t want.  There needs to be sanctions against Boston.

Hello world!

Fine.  I’ve been avoiding the idea for a while.  Now I have a blog.  Nothing specific, just things on my mind, usually based on current events and news stories.

My blog has 2 rules:

1. Do not use my real name or any nickname that I have been known to use.
2. Don’t be an asshole, where “asshole” is defined solely by me.

I hope you like it, or at least find my ramblings worth thinking about.