Right is beautiful
Alexandra Petri speaks against yet another leftist propaganda.
With apologies to my lefty friends, I don't think anyone can deny that if anyone can choose to be left- or right-handed, he should choose to be right handed.
Why? Well, the liberals are on the left, with the goats, and the conservatives are on the right, with the sheep. Which side would you rather be?
Good luck finding a job, Trina Thompson
Especially with the history of suing your former associations like this.
I am not sure where she got the idea that the college was obliged to provide her with a job. The tuition she paid was in exchange for classes. If she found classes useful when she took them, then the college fulfilled their obligation. If she didn't find them useful, well, maybe she should've dropped out or changed majors (as far as I know, no classes at any college is offered "satisfaction guaranteed").
This story is an amalgam of two different cancers of American society which could eventually kill us: litigiousness and death of individualism. Would it have occurred to anybody, say, 50 years ago, to sue McDonalds because eating their food made you fat (supposedly) or to sue colleges because you didn't develop useful marketable skills while you were there? The frivolousness and absurdity in these cases test the limits of our sense of fairness. The plaintiffs suffered no meaningful injustice at the hand of the defendants, and the defendant doesn't deserve any of this: definitely not a judgment against them, and perhaps not even the cost of defending themselves.
Perhaps this litigiousness is, in part, related to the death of individualism. Someone who understands her role as an individual in a society would understand what her duties are and when she failed to achieve it—with no one else to blame. She would have understood that she had a choice in where to eat, and therefore getting fat was her fault, not McDonald's. She would have understood that she had a choice in majors, classes, and experiences (internship, research, etc.) she could have while in college, so she wouldn't have been so quick to blame the college for non-employment: after all, assuming she started looking in the spring semester for a job, she hasn't looked for 1 year yet!
Something has to be done about these two phenomena. Maybe it will take the form of tort reform, and maybe it will take an education campaign. I don't know exactly what it'll take (because whatever it is, it has to be Constitutional; it can't be a tyrannical president or federal government telling what people can and can't do), but if we don't do something about these ... signs of decay, one day, they will be the cause of our downfall.
I love FoxNews (or rather, the Factor) legal analyses
Because they are (or at least seems to be to my layman eyes) constitutional—and socially conservative. Here's the latest one:
He's absolutely right. There is nothing we can do about the case that was already closed—he doesn't spell it out, but we all know that our constitution prohibits double jeopardy. A criminal, no matter how heinous cannot be tried twice for the same crime—the only way a judge or jury can rule on the same issue is on the appeal by the convicted, which obviously isn't going to happen here.
And he makes a very good case what can be done within the confines of the Constitution. Although this "civil confinement" seems like it could be a slippery slope, but well, this case seems like a clear-cut case—and it's not an indefinite confinement, it's only 18-months, and there will be a hearing to justify it, not just be done on the whims of some lawyer or administrator.
This was a very ... pleasant legal analysis to listen to: unlike liberals who would be all for re-trying the case over and over with different juries and with different venues until they get the "right" result, if it's a case they care about (which obviously won't be a child rape case—maybe it'll be different if someone shot a child with a handgun). And his concluding remarks, "I will not weep if something happens to David Earls," is, well, amusing (and, like everything else in the segment, I agree—I personally won't do anything to people like this guy, but I see no reason to grieve if someone thought, well, Oklahoma legal system didn't do enough).
This segment doesn't seem to be so clear cut.
I guess in the general terms, I agree with Megyn Kelly's sentiment—I don't want a state that meddles in affairs of private citizens—in which no clear crime has been committed, not one of those blanket laws like "disturbing the peace" or something. But, when children (i.e. legal minors) are involved, well, I do think the rules change a little. The government has a duty to protect those who cannot protect themselves—those who, by one reason or another, have no, and cannot have, self-determination and self-ownership. The children (and unborn babies, in my opinion) are the largest constituents of this group.
When a parent clearly (and beyond all reasonable doubt) endangers a child, I think the government—especially the local government, has the power and duty to intervene. This can, of course be a slippery slope again, as we know from the notorious reputation of some child protective services, but some cases are clear enough that it's beyond this type of argument—and this probably is one of them.
What would happen if this analysis/opinion were done by a liberal? Why, they'd sue McDonald's, because obviously neither the child nor the mother is responsible for the actions of either of them—but McDonald's executives are!
Ron Paul with high school students
Old people. They ramble. They are so afraid that we didn't get it the first time. 
Thinking back to my own high school years, I probably understood as little of what Democrats and Republicans stand for as one student did (or at least her question wondering how Ron Paul could be a Republican suggests that she has been fed heavily biased information about what core Republican values are—and what Democrats actually do).
He seems fine for a man tortured less than a minute ago
And he sounds rather insincere. If what he went through was really as horrible as he insinuated it was, how did he recover so quickly? He sounds more like a man who already made up his mind about how he was going to represent waterboarding and went through the motions. After all, the sergeant said that average was 14 seconds—a man who actually put his reputation on the line that waterboarding isn't torture (I don't know who this man is, but at least that's the impression I got from the video) is going to at least beat the average—unless he's a chicken.
And how did the water get into his nose? Wasn't the sergeant holding his nose as he was pouring water in? So if mouth is the only point of entry, and no one's holding his mouth open (I forget whether it was supposed to be forced open in enhanced interrogations), couldn't this wuss hold his breath for 7 seconds?
And really, my point is that he recovered too quickly. I've dived the wrong way into the pool a few times before and got water forced through my nose—when it's really bad, it takes more than a minute to recover properly—properly enough to talk. Blowing the nose once doesn't quite do it.
Anyways. I don't think I ever denied that waterboarding is a torture—for some definition of torture. But then, there's the waterboarding kind of torture. And there's the pulling out your fingernails one by one kind of torture, or even cutting your finger off one by one, or murdering your family and raping your wife in front of you kind of "torture". The word "torture" covers so wide a range that to call an act torture is to conflate a relatively benign interrogation technique and truly damaging, irreversible acts of sadism.
United States inconveniences a terrorist for 15 seconds in order to save lives. Terrorists cut off fingers of innocents to terrorize more innocents. Do you see the difference? Apparently liberals do not.
Mansfield Flag Controversy Draws Worldwide Outrage
CBS reports (found via HotAir.com):
Debbie McLucas is one of four hospital supervisors at Kindred Hospital in Mansfield. Last week, she hung a three-by-five foot American flag in the office she shares with the other supervisors.
When McLucas came to work Friday, her boss told her another supervisor had found her flag offensive. ... McLucas said the supervisor who complained has been in the United States for 14 years and is formerly from Africa. McLucas said that supervisor took down the flag herself.
Well, I'm glad that no one has yet complained about my flag at my desk. It's a small, ordinary one, but it has some sentimental value for me, and I would hate to have to take it down.
I wonder: would that supervisor have found it more acceptable if that flag on display was burning, rather than just hanging majestically?
Keep your assets in anything but dollar?
This guy Peter Schiff says a lot of things that makes sense, but I am not sure if there's anything else that can be considered more stable than the dollar (except for gold or silver, of course, but more on that later). Most currencies are compared to the dollar—some, like the Chinese money, are even pegged to the dollar. If something real catastrophic happens to the dollar (so that usual mechanisms that counter inflation, such as increased savings interest rate, cannot cope), whose money is more trustworthy?
I am happy enough to invest in other country's (such as China and other third world countries) economy—that's where more growing can happen and that's where a lot of funds are going. But if I had to put my trust in a country's government (which is what I am doing when I put my trust in a currency, since all currency is now fiat currency), there is no government I would trust more than the government of U.S.A. (I don't trust it very much, but I trust other governments even less).
As for keeping one's money in gold or silver, well, I don't think it can be more than hedging one's bet—i.e. it can't be your sole item in your portfolio. Your money may be protected against inflation, but your money is doing absolutely nothing. You will be, very precisely, the lazy servant who couldn't even put the master's money in a bank so that he can collect interest. And as for having a company keep the gold or silver for you, well, if the situation for which you are preparing ever arises ... I am not sure if there'd be any company, in any country, that can be trusted.
In a way, I guess I am in a happy position of having nothing to invest at the moment (some extra cash that I have I should keep so that I don't have to worry about how soon I'll be getting my travel reimbursements). But in a few months to a year when that won't be the case any more ... well. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Veterans are not the "Giving Tree"
And subjecting them to a backdoor draft sure doesn't seem right:
I served on active duty for five years and was honorably discharged in June, 2007. Less than a year later I received orders recalling me to service with one month's notice and I am currently deployed in the Middle East. I was definitely not alone, serving with me are more than 70 others who were recalled. All had been honorably discharged and most had been out of service for two to four years. All of us were hesitant to come back and only did so through fear of imprisonment, loss of civilian jobs, or simply guilt. I can speak with authority when I say this IS a draft.
Stopping this practice of unilaterally "recalling" soldiers from "reserve" would fix the skin-deep symptom. Increasing the level of funding for DoD (especially for human resources, such as soldiers, not developing weapons of mass destruction) would alleviate the symptom at a deeper level—as I do hope that there's enough dignity left at our military branches that if they could fill the manpower needs through new volunteers, they would not dare draft the veterans and interrupt their lives.
But perhaps, in the face of growing federal budget deficit (and much of welfare spending being part of the mandatory spending, chances for real boost of defense budget is slim, especially with the liberal administration we have), what we really should do is conserve our strength.
Don't maintain troops or bases where we don't need them, such as Europe or Korea. Don't fight battles that do not serve our interests. Don't commit our forces to part of some international organizations such as U.N. "peacekeeping" force.
Finish up the tasks we have started around the world, but once each and every one of them is done, make a commitment not to intervene without actual casus belli—and not without actual congressional declaration of war. Defend America's borders and annihilate her real enemies. No more, no less.
Boy Playing 'Cops and Robbers' Shot by Deputy
Gordon says deputies were responding to reports that someone was riding a bicycle and brandishing a handgun. They spotted the rider and ordered him to drop the weapon but instead, Gordon says he pointed it at the deputies.
One deputy fired a shot and hit the boy in the upper body.
That deputy must be one coward.
A coward who has to act with deadly force from a distance, because he's so afraid that a little boy would be such an excellent marksman (or should I say marksboy?) that he would hurt him mortally if the little boy did have a real gun.
Either that, or he's one evil man who's out to terrorize the neighborhood wielding power that he does not deserve.
Pick your poison.