Politics

It’s lawful to make up to 200 gallons of beer or wine per year for your and your family’s consumption, at least under federal law (I’m not sure about all the states). So why, just over seventy years after the Twenty-First Amendment became effective, is it still a federal felony to distill alcohol for consumption without obtaining a license and enduring all sorts of federal red tape? I can understand why commercial production would be regulated, but if the government condescends to allow us to make our own beer and wine, why not our own whiskey and vodka, too? (Disclosure: I am a former homebrewer — of beer — with occasional aspirations of getting back in the game. But I have no aspirations of making my own booze. I so very rarely drink the hard stuff that the opportunity cost of making my own would be prohibitive.)

Bill Gates supports rugged individualism in telling youth of America to stand on their own two feet and strive for excellence.

Look, I don’t know perfectly that Bill Gates said this but if he did, my hat is off to him. It was reported recently that Mr. Gates gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school.

He speaks of how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Here are his 11 points:

Rule 1 : Life is not fair – get used to it!

I’m going to traffic court tomorrow to adjudicate one of the Mrs parking tickets. Normally I’d just pay up. Not this one. It’s $50.

It was also uniquely got.

Normally, to get a parking ticket, the car must be parked. That means stopped, without occupant, in an illegal place.

In the Peoples Free Democrat Republic of Washington, D.C., that also includes several unique variations:

- at a legal place, but not at the right time;
- parked where some City Hall wanker, or fed gubmint mucky-muck wants to park for a plush conference attended on the taxpayer dime;
- parked in a zone that gets re-zoned during the day, without notice; the usual penalty for this is a $250 ticket, a boot ($175) and/or a tow ($225).
- PWW (parking while White)

The President has authorized General Petraeus’ request for more troops for Iraq, but some are suggesting that we encourage the enemy.

The President of the United States is the Commander and Chief of the U.S. Military. This means that he has full authority to send troops into any part of the world that is necessary in order to protect the interests of the United States. Now of course he is also working with complete support of the United Nations through several UN resolutions with regard to our efforts to free the Iraqi people and in doing so, stabilize the Middle East. Or at least leave it more stabilized than we found it.

It’s no wonder that Democrats get labelled with the dreaded ‘L’ word.

“When I’m president, we’ll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day,” said Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri. (while referring to the then upcoming Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in university admissions)

The Supreme Court is the highest court of the land. I don’t always agree with their decisions, but their decisions are supposed to be respected. If you don’t like their decisions, then change the law or the Constitution, but I don’t see anywhere in the Constitution where the President can unilaterally overrule the Supreme Court!

And in true dumbass fashion-

From TBOGG:

The tangled web starts to unravel

Jake Tapper writes about the lies that took us into war over at Salon (it’s Salon Premium). Here is an interesting taste:

Korb also suggests that this affair could seriously affect the ability of the U.S. government to function efficiently. “What this administration has done to military and intelligence professionals in government is disgraceful,” he says, citing Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was publicly rebuffed by Wolfowitz and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after predicting — correctly, it now seems — that it would take “several hundred thousand troops to keep the peace in postwar Iraq.” Korb also cites the formation earlier this year of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of a few dozen former intelligence officials from Army Intelligence, CIA, FBI, Defense and State Departments, to protest what they saw as a misuse of intelligence for the purposes of building a case for war. “This will also have long-term ramifications,” Korb says.

With the way that the economy is going and all of the different things that the government is doing to royally screw all middle and lower class Americans (like the recent ‘dividend tax cut’ and the passing of the estate tax repeal in the HOR), I was going to post a major bitch post, but then I came across this post by Jeff Cooper and decided that he said everything that I wanted to say and more, but more eloquently (and it’s nearly a month old)!

What’s Going On?

From the watch:

The American Dilemma

As many people warned before Bush took us into war, the problem was not the war itself. The really ugly problem would be dealing with the aftermath. Well, now we are well and truly stuck in a quagmire, with no end in sight. Today when the costs of empire are being exposed and both our soldiers and the Iraqis are dying, it looks increasingly like there are no good answers to our dilemma: how can we extract ourselves from this mess without creating greater carnage and leaving even more disaster in our wake?

From It’s Still the Economy, Stupid:

Cassandra Revisted

Earlier today on Wampum, I hinted as to some developing controversy regarding tomorrow’s unemployment numbers. This has its roots the Cassandra Complex ™ I unfortunately developed back in January, when I first began to read the raw unemployment reports from the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics]. I noted back then that January’s employment picture looked particularly rosy not due to any major upswing in the economy, but because the Administration had altered the way it was collecting and reporting data, conveniently skewing results in the process. February and March’s results were also tampered with, but decidedly less so than January’s. Then, in April, I noticed that the BLS had planned in June to once again institute major changes to the employment reports. Whether these changes will effect the spinning of tomorrow’s unemployment report, I can’t say. But it’s also a question I noticed was asked by at least two media sources today:

Is running up huge deficits today the Republican plan to curtail future spending?

US ‘faces future of chronic deficits’
By Peronet Despeignes in Washington

The Bush administration has shelved a report commissioned by the Treasury that shows the US currently faces a future of chronic federal budget deficits totalling at least $44,200bn in current US dollars.

The study, the most comprehensive assessment of how the US government is at risk of being overwhelmed by the “baby boom” generation’s future healthcare and retirement costs, was commissioned by then-Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill.

But the Bush administration chose to keep the findings out of the annual budget report for fiscal year 2004, published in February, as the White House campaigned for a tax-cut package that critics claim will expand future deficits.