As Kurt mentions below this is a dark day for America and specifically those who cherish its founding documents and principles and who held out hope that we could one day return to an embrace of these ideals.

Tonight’s GOP debate surely will carry special gravity as perhaps finally we can begin to take the choice the Republicans now have more seriously.

If anything good can come of this tragedy, perhaps it will be an awakening within the party that they alone hold the one chance our Nation has at returning to one of Laws rather than men. This truly is the moment I hope the Republican voters will begin to see the gravity of the choice they will make, and the severe consequences it will have on the future trajectory of our beloved America.

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I don’t really know how to express how puerile and silly the whole thing with the First Lady and that hashtag thing was, so I’ve put it down in a few thousand words instead (and included a thousand empty ones for you to play along and do your own as well).

(By the way, a whole bunch more here. I haven’t read through all of them, so if I accidentally ripped someone off with one of mine, it was totally unintentional.)

Have fun

Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from The Ranch)

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The administration—whose latest foray into unobstructed, unlegislated, we’ve-got-this, go-it-aloneism was the fabulously ‘effed up roll-out of HealthCare.gov—is going to make 2014 the year of the Executive Branch takes on the world without the messiness of involving the People’s Branch of the federal government?

This’ll be something to see…

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from The Ranch)

I am (finally) completely speechless:

Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from The Ranch)

UPDATE (yea, it’s been a whole two minutes):
Come to think of it, it’s not the first time I’ve been left speechless by a House member…

UP-UPDATE: Here’s one along similar lines: Perhaps the new line from the Statists could be that the health insurance policies aren’t new…they’re just changed … see? it’s not different, it’s the same, just changed

…but then again, perhaps this is what they’re hearing when we try to explain to them that it is different:

The benevolence of our overlords on display today as Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri expresses her sympathy for those lowly prolitariat forced to abide by her legislative edicts.

As Lindsay Graham (of all people?!) actually shows some fortitude by insisting on a vote on the Vitter Amendment (which would subject all Hill employees, from the Senators and Representatives themselves to their most junior of staffers with the actual cost of Obamacare the rest of us have to suffer), the Rolla reprobate finds it within her generous heart to stand up for the less-fortunate. Er, or at least the less fortunate with whom she has the misfortune to have to be in physical contact on a regular basis. Her reaction:

“I don’t mind giving up mine,” Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill said of the federal contribution to her personal health insurance. “I’m in a much [better situation] than the young ladies and the young men that work for me that have just gotten out of college with large student debts and that are still trying to figure out if they can afford the rent in Washington, D.C., or the car payment in Columbia, Mo.”

What about those less fortunate who aren’t blessed with working for someone who actually has the authority to exempt them from this horrific law? If those freshly-minted college graduates who work for Senator McCaskill deserve better, how about their contemporaries who have chosen a career in something more productive than water-carrying for legislative tyrants?

So here you have someone who voted for Obamacare admitting how unaffordable the “Affordable” Care Act is…so much so that she wishes to deliver folks burdened with it from under its onerous requirements.

If only her sympathy and sense of service extended beyond the few hundred square feet of her Senate office.

Truly incredible.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from an Undisclosed Location)

So, as I’ve said before, I’m mostly agnostic on gay marriage (I believe the entire institution should be left to personal/familial/community/religious devices and the government should remove itself entirely from the argument lock-stock-and-barrel). That said, you can’t be gay—well, or even straight it seems—in the United States today, according to the media, and not be completely and obsessively consumed by the issue (and, natch, your opinion can only be “FOR!”).

And since SCOTUS is hearing it this week, I suppose I might as well poke a stick into the monkey cage:

If we’re supposed to oppose DOMA on states’ rights grounds, should we then oppose the effort to overturn Prop 8?

Discuss.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot) from HHQ

UPDATE
Excellent point made (and I don’t just say this because I have several captions vying for his “Best of” category) by VtheK from the comments:

This country would be so much better off if people cared as much about fiscal responsibility and economic growth as they do about giving same sex couples a piece of paper signed by a bureaucrat to legitimize their coupling.

Speaking of which, I think the time has come to push for polygamy. If gender doesn’t [matter], what’s so damned magical about the number 2?

(As for the first part, I have made this exact point many times myself, and I have much more to say about Viking’s second point, which perhaps I will anon…)

Okay I’ll admit: I don’t get it.

ESPN feels the need to apologize because Brent Musburger says some girl is pretty. And yet, CNN feels no compunction whatsoever to apologize when their #1 rated program goes on a rant about killing a previous guest?

Just sayin’, it’s a pretty crazy world. And Nick doesn’t really get it.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HHQ)

P.S., speaking of apologizing, sorry you had to watch through that Alex Jones guy for almost a whole minute just to get to the good stuff.

I’ll start off by saying, I’m not totally agnostic on gay marriage, but I’m pretty close. I think both sides argue the wrong points in turn, and since I’ve never really felt the need to appeal to the government for validation (let alone validation of my personal relationships), I say let the chips fall where they may.

In fact, the more libertarian I become (by the day, it seems), the less I care, frankly about gay marriage. My partner and I love each other and we don’t need a government stamp nor piece of paper to make it official. Heck, even if we didn’t have the support and acknowledgement of our family and friends (we, ftr, do), we’d be content just to “watch the world die”, so to speak, our love strong as it is.

Personal mushyness aside, however, Reason‘s Scott Shackford has me confused today. Fair enough, his post last week on the site’s Hit & Run blog (which I read habitually and I recommend to you as well) is after all entitled “The Libertarian Gay Marriage Paradox“. But it seems to me the paradox is misplaced.

He first suggests that the actual libertarian argument against gay marriage (that marriage as an institution itself isn’t any of the government’s business) “is indeed a conclusion, not an argument”, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. In fact, it’s the argument supporting basically all libertarian positions, isn’t it? It’s the one I use all the time on a wide range of issues.

Be that as it may, he goes on to build then knock down a strawman libertarian argument that doesn’t exist, to wit: “Opponents of gay marriage recognition are not arguing for smaller government; quite the opposite” because, he suggests opponents feel “we need government to make certain that humanity continues to procreate.” Sure, social conservatives are making that argument, but do you know of any libertarian who’s saying that? I sure wouldn’t. “Paradox”? I don’t see it.

What is paradoxical, however, is his approach to support for gay marriage:

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Real quick post here before I turn in tonight…

I haven’t had a chance to watch all that much of the president’s awkward-moment-filled appearance on Univision last night (here, here, and here, are a few snippets), but every clip I see makes me want for more.

Watching just the little I’ve seen, and the hard-hitting questions and follow-ups, though, I wonder: Do the reporters who cover the president and his other lickspittle trucklers in the MSM ever feel embarrassed by their sycophancy? I mean really, do they ever, at the end of the day, stop and feel ashamed that they do so poorly at what their job is actually supposed to be: Seeking truth from power?

Just a thought. Every once in a while I end the day not having done much (the military is a big place, and you can’t sleigh a dragon every day). It makes me feel uneasy when that happens. I wonder, seriously, how reporters feel at the end of their day, to see people like Univision’s moderators (and audience members, for that matter, too) doing their jobs so much more competently.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HHQ)

P.S., Notice, too, by the way, that every answer the president gives is about how his problems are somebody else’s fault. I imagine this excuse-roladex he has would grow tiring to hear for the American electorate if he were actually—regularly—asked real questions…you know, the kind that the “Pimp with the Limp” doesn’t tend to ask…

UPDATE (from Dan):  Holy cow, Nick, did you read my mind?  (Or maybe just see my notes on the blog dashboard?)  I had intended to get at the same thing you address in your postscript, particularly about how the president blamed Republicans for his failure to pass an immigration bill.  Good post.

UP-UPDATE (also from Dan):  love how Drudge promotes the interview:

UP-UP-UPDATE (more…)

Here’s something I can’t quite figure out:

In all the back-and-forth over the debt ceiling increase, it’s become de rigueur to demand program cuts and budget tightening now rather than in the ‘out-years’ because the cuts will never materialize. Inasmuch, we’re often told: “You can’t bind a future Congress”.

If that’s the case, then why is there such a thing as “mandatory spending”?

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

I realize I’m coming to this a couple days late, but does Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid not understand the irony of calling for “shared sacrifice” (by way of higher taxes on ‘the rich’) in a Nation wherein one percent of the population covers nearly half of the entire income tax bill, and one tenth pays about three-quarters of it?

For that matter, all this talk of reaching a “deal” between the Republicans in the House and the ever-absent leading-from-the-rear Administration seems to me to be pretty overly done: I always thought the “deal” was that the president would be given the authority to continue to spend money we don’t have and cannot afford in exchange for, well, simply spending less of it. What am I missing? And why should that deal be so hard for him and the likes of Reid to accept?

Wouldn’t it be nice if the concept of “sacrifice” extended to those in Washington for whom the ultimate sacrifice would be to not spend other peoples’ money?

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

UPDATE (from Dan):  Nick, good points.  Do wonder if Reid will ask public employee unions to share in the sacrifice.   And while we’re at it, what about White House staffers?

Alright, so it’s well-known (and almost excusable with today’s short-attention-span public) that sex sells. That explains why the at-first reluctant former mainstream media went wall-to-wall with coverage of soon-to-be (but not soon enough) former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner’s naughtiness. (Of course, their initial reluctance is no question due to the “D” he wears on the right side of his title.) That Weiner was one of the nastiest, most partisan, and rhetorically ugly members of the once-vaunted assembly was of no interest to the press. That his support for policies that have been an albatross around America’s neck also rose no brows. What they wanted were those pics (once Andrew Breitbart forced their hands with undeniable photographic evidence that they were never going to seek out themselves) and a salacious headline (one preferably that included a grade-school-era pun, if possible, please).

The next thing the press darlings love is a human-interest story. Forget the details of a crime. Forget any sort of ongoing work of the authorities to capture a criminal. Certainly forget any sort of racial description of an alleged perpetrator. But if something’s gone down in the big city, you can count on the locals (and if it’s dramatic enough, the Big Three) to cover the angle of the family that’s been affected or the children left orphaned.

So we were introduced over and over to the dutiful wife, Huma Abedin—currently with child. Naturally the angle of her working for the oft-humiliated wife of the former president and current Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was played, often with a sly wink. Much was made about the likelihood of the two conferring over how to best deal with the situation, both in public and in private. In fact, it wasn’t until Mrs. Weiner returned from her overseas trip with the Secretary (on which she’d been when the whole escapade broke) that the Congressman finally decided to fold up his tent and go home. There was even the irony of Bill Clinton having officiated at their wedding. (Is he a rabbi now? Talk about a comeback!)

In all that, though; in all the delving into this couple’s details and discussing ad nauseam about what’s next for them… no interest from those stalwarts for the Public’s Right To Know about this little tidbit:

It turns out that Huma Abedin may have very close links to a little terrorist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood.

Al-Liwa Al-Arabi (translated here) claims to have leaked an extensive list of members of the Brotherhood’s secret women’s division, which is known alternately as the Muslim Sisterhood or the International Women’s Organization (IWO). This detailed list was partially published by Al Jazeera and several other major Arab newspapers. And it included Huma’s mother, Saleha Abedin.

Apparently her brother is also closely tied with the Brotherhood.
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NewsBusters (a site hosted by the Media Research Center) is always a great source to highlight the blatant leftist leaning of what used to be considered ‘mainstream’ media outlets. One of their most visited nemeses is Chris Matthews of MSNBC.

Their latest link for Matthews highlights his comments last night regarding Rep. Anthony Weiner’s current predicament. It’s titled “Matthews: Weiner in Trouble Because His Behavior Offends ‘Culturally Backward’ Christian Conservatives”, and naturally this insinuation by Matthews grabs the viewer for its obvious condescension and elitism. But it seems NewsBusters may have missed an even more curious comment from the huge-headed commentator. As you view the imbedded video, tell me if what Matthews says at 0:10 strikes you as well:

It’s getting very very hard to defend the behavior—politically—of the party. Now you throw on top of that, immoral behavior, indiscreet behavior, embarrassing behavior, gross behavior like this…”

(My emphasis)

Now? “NOW “?!

Where was Matthews when Rep. Massa was playing tickle-fight with his staffers and encountering Rahm Emanuel in the shower? Has he never heard of Barney Frank’s brothel? Elliot Spitzer, Jim McGreevey, and my God, Bill Clinton?!

“NOW“?!

Should we consider from Matthews that all these (and believe me, we could go on all day listing them, no?) dalliances pale in comparison with Weiner twitting pics of his unit to consenting, presumably adult ladies, and that this most recent embarrassment to the party of Jackson and Jefferson is finally the one that sends him over the edge?

Thank goodness for MRC and NewsBusters for watching his incoherent drivel so we don’t have to and can therefore enjoy the snippets of it for what they’re worth: a theater of the absurd.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

UPDATE (from Dan):  Nick, seems Matthews believes 91% of Americans are “‘Culturally Backward’ Christian Conservatives” given that that percentage of our fellow citizens believe it is “morally wrong” for a married man (or woman) to have an affair.

So, Rand Paul has a great week, by easily winning the Republican nomination for Senate from Kentucky over a much better funded and connected establishment opponent. Well, a great week, until he stepped into a shitstorm over a law nearly as old as he is:

In an interview Wednesday with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Paul was asked whether he believed private businesses should have the right to refuse service to African-Americans.

“Yes,” Paul said. “I’m not in favor of any discrimination of any form. … But I think what’s important about this debate is not written into any specific ‘gotcha’ on this, but asking the question: what about freedom of speech? Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent? Should we limit racists from speaking?”

Now, I’m not a racist, so I don’t even know what sort of mindset it takes to consider someone unworthy based on his race. That likely comes from my upbringing here in the Western US. The pioneer spirit still lives out here, and as part of it, a belief that cooperation and hard work are much more productive, and therefore desirable, than concerns and hang-ups about anybody’s differences. This upbringing of mine leaves me vexed when I encounter an actual racist, and is likely why I’m last onboard to classify someone as racist based on anything other than obvious and blatant action clearly identified as having its genesis in racist beliefs. (For example, while I often find them sophomoric and unfunny, racist jokes don’t usually offend me outright, even though they don’t generally entertain me either.)

All that said, is it possible for someone to object to the Civil Rights Act’s restrictions on private business and private property without being viewed as a racist? Clearly the lunatic Left has registered their vote. But as I read news on the kefuffle over Paul, all of it seems to be based on the premise that there is no acceptance whatsoever for criticizing the Civil Rights Act in any way, and doing so means you’re a racist. Why is that?

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from an Undisclosed Secret Alternate HQ)

As Dan blogged yesterday, National Security Advisor General James Jones over the weekend started his remarks to the Washington Institute For Near East Policy with a joke I heard when I was in grade school.*

Quite the furor from all sides. Nobody seems to be giving the guy a pass here. As usual, I find I’m the only one who seems to feel the way I do. Which is:

Two things:
First: Um, it was a joke. Without getting into a long discussion of the use of hyperbole and stereotype in humor, I’ll leave it at: Some stuff’s funny, some stuff’s not. I don’t think Jones did a great job with his delivery (took way too long), and perhaps any joke with racial or cultural overtones would be inappropriate if you’re representing your boss. But it was a joke. Have we grown so calous as a Nation to the actual things going on around us that it’s peoples’ choice of humor that drives us so mad with indignation? Isn’t that (granted, on a much, much smaller scale) what we’re fighting against?

Second: I have much more problem with this Administration’s anti-Israel positions than the jokes his NSA tells. Here’s a guy who brow-beats Israel for building apartments in Jerusalem. (Um, is there any part of the “peace process” that takes that off the table?) Here’s a guy who is cuddling up with Syria. Here’s a guy who seems, shall we say, cavalier about Iranian nukes. Here’s a guy who treats their head of state like some sort of pariah. Looking for some sort of “undertone” or “hidden anti-Semitic agenda” in a silly joke is along the lines of the old sledge-hammer analogy. Obama’s anti-Israel agenda is pretty clear to see.

What I care about is what he’s doing. There’s enough there to not spend my energy getting too wound up about a joke.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

*(Full disclosure, when I was a kid, I knew an old Jewish guy. He loved his Jewish jokes, thus early on I was exposed to the self-depricating humor one appreciates when he’s a wise old guy. Methinks this has a lot to do, also, with my historic lack of sensitivity to most charges of “racism” based only on things someone says, rather than his actions. Perhaps having been raised out West and among tolerant people, I developed my aw, get over it reaction to perceived slights.)

UPDATE (from Dan): Nick, it’s one thing for a Jew to tell a self-deprecating joke. It’s quite another for a man with a questionable record on Israel telling the joke. Not just that, given the Administration’s anti-Israel positions, it showed a terrible absence of judgment. There’s no problem with telling a joke. That’s not the issue here. The issue is the context which you get at with your second point.

There is an emerging tension between this Administration and its Jewish supporters as per its Israel policies. (See e.g., this Jewish Obama supporter‘s lament.) And this joke exacerbated the tensions while playing into the worst stereotypes of Jews.