The Aloha Court just overruled the U.S. Supreme Court

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In 2008, the United States Supreme Court decided in the Heller case that the Second Amendment right to bear arms applies not just to militias, but also to individual people. While militias are mentioned in the Amendment, the noun to which the right is granted is the “people.”

Individuals are “people.”

After Heller, much teeth-gnashing and garment-rending ensued from the left. They had hoped that the Second Amendment applied only to militias. There being essentially no legal militias in the country anymore, that would mean the Second Amendment would apply to nobody.

And so, nobody could have guns. Well, nobody could have guns legally. Anyone with a gun would be in possession of it illegally. (You know where I’m going with this.) Such illegal possession of a gun would be outside the law. The possessor would be an outlaw. When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

You gotta admit, that’s a pretty good line.

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Joe Biden’s insanity defense

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Is he faking it?

Yesterday, the special prosecutor (technically called a “special counsel” these days, a term which obfuscates in my opinion) released his report on his investigation of Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.

(It was not a good day for the Democrats. On the same day, the Supreme Court signaled in oral argument that they intend to smack down four publicity-hungry Colorado Supreme Court justices/activists who canceled Donald Trump from the Colorado ballot. My condolences to those four partisan hacks whose 15 minutes of fame is about to expire. And my congratulations to the three spirited dissenters on that same court, who’ve been vindicated.)

The special prosecutor’s investigation concerned Biden’s removal of highly classified materials from government offices including the White House. He put the materials into his garage, his basement, his beach house, his Corvette . . . you know, all the places you keep the nation’s top secrets.

He did this numerous times.

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Based on today’s oral arguments, it will probably be a decision for Trump

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As I expected and predicted, the Supreme Court will probably decide the Trump/Colorado case in favor of Trump.

I doubt the decision will be unanimous. On the liberal side, Justice Sotomayor was outspoken in her questions to Trump’s lawyer (Jonathan Mitchell who was arguing his sixth Supreme Court case). Justice Kagan’s questions, too, suggest to me that she will come down against Trump.

Justice Brown Jackson was hard to read, with questions that seemed sympathetic to Mitchell’s point that the 14th Amendment bar fails to mention the presidency and also sympathetic to Trump’s due process argument – the argument that he was effectively convicted of the high crime of insurrection without ever being charged with it.  

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Biden’s border blame game is a cynical lie and everyone knows it

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Immediately upon taking office, Joe Biden reversed President Trump’s “stay-in-Mexico” policy. Under that policy, immigrants seeking asylum were required to stay in Mexico or their home country while applying for asylum in the United States.

The alternative – followed by the preceding Obama Administration – is for the immigrants to enter the country with the proviso that they have to show up for a hearing some months or years in the future to determine their asylum claim. Of course, many immigrants never showed up for their hearings, and simply remained in the country illegally.

Which brings us to a semantics point. People who choose words precisely call these immigrants who are in the county illegally, “illegal immigrants.” Other people, whose choice of words is subordinate to their political leanings, instead use various euphemisms.  

The euphemism crowd wants not to call illegal immigrants “illegal immigrants” because such a term suggests that they are acting illegally. Most of us frown on illegal acts (though a growing number apparently don’t).

Think of it as a branding strategy, something like calling garbage collectors “sanitation engineers” or calling communists “liberals.”

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Culture crash; thank the liberals

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Remember when America’s great cities were great? San Francisco, New York, Chicago and other major cities were centers of art, culture, wealth, sophistication, and shopping.

Now, the cities are overrun with vagrants. Liberal judges decided that people have a Constitutional right (see, Martin v. Boise) to camp on the sidewalks and poop in the gutter, because stopping them from doing so constitutes cruel and unusual punishment for violating the laws that prohibit them from doing so.

Crimes such as shoplifting have been de-criminalized. The outcomes are predictable to anyone but a liberal: This new retail mode where payment is optional has produced more cases where people choose not to; Store owners, from small family-owned hardware stores to Walmart, are leaving the cities because they can’t make money if they can’t charge for their goods; liberals are shrieking “racists!”

Laws against dangerous drugs have been relaxed. The result is more dangerous drugs and drug addicts. Duh.

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You say you want a revolution in Texas?

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Confederate dead at the Battle of Antietam
Antietam, 1862

The governor of Texas says his state is being “invaded” and that under the Constitution he has the right to defend his border.

On the first point, millions of people are indeed unlawfully crossing the border into Texas. Joe Biden refuses to do anything about it. In fact, he seems to be encouraging it. He stopped construction of Donald Trump’s border wall, reversed the “stay in Mexico” policy which required immigrants seeking asylum to remain in Mexico pending a decision by American authorities, and, to the extent he accidentally catches illegal immigrants, he usually lets them go with a polite request that they appear at a hearing scheduled years in the future.

Most don’t appear. It’s like catch-and-release fishing. They’re usually smart enough not to get caught twice.

The border policy is so asinine that you have to wonder if someone has the goods on Joe.

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I’m sick and tired of media hatred and censorship of Christians

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Sensational rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud appeared for an interview over the weekend immediately after leading his Houston Texans to a playoff win. The exhausted, battered, victorious 22-year-old opened with these words:

“First and foremost, I just want to give all glory to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

The game was carried by NBC. They posted Stroud’s postgame interview but, predictably, edited out his opening statement – the very statement that the player himself said was “first and foremost” to him and his terrific game.

Stroud is Black. It used to be that liberals tolerated Black displays of religion because they thought such displays were cute, as in Black churches with people dancing in the aisle and shouting “Hallelujah!”

Never mind that such displays were profound and spiritual for the Black participants; liberals condescendingly tolerated them only because they saw them as something like a kindergarten Christmas play.

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Should we pay poor people to get sterilized?

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Back in the good old days of Roe v. Wade (unless you were a fetus) we paid poor people to have abortions. Ok, we didn’t pay the money directly to them, but instead paid it through Medicaid to their abortionist.

Abortions that were not paid for by Medicaid were almost always paid for by private insurance or were done for free at abortion clinics as a “public service.” It’s safe to say that the killing of hardly any babies was paid for by the mother, except perhaps in a lifelong emotion way. That’s the way we set up the system.

We didn’t want such women to have babies. We figured that someone who could not figure out the pill, condoms, the IUD, abstinence, the rhythm method, the morning after pill, or the word “no” or even “it’s my period,” was someone we didn’t want as a mother.

So why don’t we pay poor people to get themselves sterilized? That way, they’ll never need an abortion – which is getting harder to get, by the way.

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Should Blacks be paid slavery reparations in the form of homelands?

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Many Black activists are agitating for two things.

One, they want reparations for the enslavement of some of their ancestors centuries ago, a small fraction of which is to be paid by the people whose ancestors were the enslavers, and a large fraction of which is to be paid by people like me whose ancestors back then were raiding rival clans in the Scottish Highlands without ever setting eyes on a Black person in their entire poor, nasty, brutish and short lives.

Two, they want to reinstitute racial segregation. They want Black dorm buildings in college, Black classes, Black this and Black that, all because the White man is not to be trusted. Who knows when he’ll break out a noose?

I do not think slavery reparations, standing alone, would do much good in elevating Black achievement. Trillions spent on Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, three generations of welfare, and 40 years of Black favoritism in job applications and college admissions have done little good for Blacks, and arguably a lot of harm.

And I think segregation, standing alone, is an equally bad idea. If the races are ever to get along and start to trust one another, they need to spend time together.

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They’re coming for your houseplants

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First, they came for the gas stoves,

And I did not speak out

Because mine is electric.

Then they came for the dishwashers,

And I did not speak out

Because I use paper plates.

Then they came for the furnaces,

And I did not speak out

Because I keep the heat at 60.

Then they came for the houseplants,

And I did not speak out

Because I’m not a houseplant.*

Even though I’m not one, some of my best and oldest friends are. I have a jade plant that is a cutting of a cutting of a cutting of a cutting of a cutting that I bought as a sophomore in college over ten years ago. I have an eight-foot cactus that looks like it came right out of the Jurassic Age. I bought it many years ago for a six-figure sum. Fortunately, the seller of that houseplant threw in a house to sweeten the deal.

I was therefore distressed to see an article in the “news” paper owned by Jeff Bozo warning us that houseplants contribute to global warming. I wondered how that was possible, since plants don’t spew carbon; they instead absorb it, and spew oxygen.

This “reporter” admits that houseplants, like all plants, do absorb a bit of carbon. But he says the amount they absorb is very small, given that they themselves are relatively small. OK, I’ll give him that.

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