As such, you have a responsibility to “legislate from the bench” in ALL circumstances where the legislators have overstepped whatever bounds are placed on them by your constitution, and in ALL circumstances where you believe the legislature has acted contrary to the interests of the people.

Some argue that judges must always enforce laws as written.

Well if that’s the case, and your constitution doesn’t allow you to exercise moral obligations, then please do me a favor and abandon any pretense of righteousness; your constitution is trash. This is a moral responsibility to your fellow man.

If on the other hand your constitution does allow this, and you’re still running on a “rule of law” ticket, I can only assume that you’ve completely abandoned your moral compass in favor of blind deference to the very same legislators to whom you’re supposed to be a constitutional counterbalance.

Go fuck yourselves.

Consider:

• Governments “take care of the poor” so we don’t feel the responsibility to take care of ourselves.
• Governments “protect us” so we don’t responsible for our own protection.
• Governments give us “work” so we don’t need to be productive.
• Governments teach us so that we don’t have to learn.

The divisiveness of winner-take-all politics relies on class warfare, pitting individual members of society against one another, communities against communities, interests against interests. And despite evidence to the contrary (it’s also widely known that Americans are among the most charitable in the world), they have convinced you that your neighbor is your enemy. So is it any wonder why this process destroys and divides rather than strengthens and unites?

We absolutely need more “community,” but this we are going to have to build on our own. Stop looking for government to solve your problems. If you look hard enough, you’ll probably find they’re responsible for them in the first place.

There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement … And they will vote for [Obama] no matter what …

The liberal faction of the mainstream media has a hard-on over this statement like it’s the writing on the wall, the beginning of the end for the Romney campaign. Even though his base – and that 47% is represented largely by southern “Red” states, I don’t think this really matters to them, and consequently to his campaign.

You have to ask yourself do they give a shit? and more importantly do they even know or understand the difference?

Probably not, to both questions. I’d wager most people with zero tax liability still think they’re getting ripped off by The Man (and to an extent they are, but that’s a topic for another discussion). And the vast majority of people — no matter their party affiliation — are dangerously uninformed on matters of economic principles. They would be shocked, as I suspect Romney would also be, to learn that despite the argument that “the rich pay almost all of the taxes” (which is nominally true), that “the rich” are far greater beneficiaries of (corporate) welfare and redistribution than are the working poor.

Also, there’s the pesky fact that the 47% is basically bullshit.

At the end of the day, whether Mitt implodes doesn’t matter. In the charade of “election year politics” and the quadrennial popularity contest that elects the President, it does. But the point is that doesn’t matter. At all. In the grand scheme of things, your corporate masters don’t care whether you pick Obama or Romney as long as you pick Obama or Romney.

Oh. You wanted a lesson in life? Here goes:

For starters, no it’s not fucking free. You personally might not have to pay for it but that does not make it “free”. Everything has a cost, and the failure to grasp this concept is failure to grasp the fundamental laws of reality.

Now that we’ve gotten today’s lesson in metaphysics out of the way and we can agree that it’s not “free”, you have some explaining to do. 

You have to explain why someone else has to pay for the things you want, for instance explain why my wife and I (who both work) should be forced to pay to support your choice to not work? You would never dream of holding me as your slave and forcing me to provide for you, yet the policies you favor, and more specifically the political means by which you seek to effect your desired outcomes, are essentially just that.

And don’t give me any crap about the people who “can’t afford it” because:

1. You’re not in that class and it’s an insult to anyone who is if you’re insinuating that, and 
2. By and large people can or could afford things but they are prevented or otherwise forcibly deprived means of doing so (cf., Scratching by: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It, On Breaking Your Legs and Giving You Crutches: A Response To A Liberal) and/or 
3. They just choose not to because they’ve been conned in to believing, just like you, that these things are “free” and that they are entitled to them without providing for them.

Also, you need to explain why this mentality of yours isn’t exactly the same as the “selfishness” you abhor when a libertarian wants to keep the whole of her own earnings in order to provide for her own family, well-being, needs, etc.

But I’m pretty sure what I’m hearing right now is the sound of deaf ears not listening.

The caption reads: "This Dad is about to be deployed and is having to say goodbye to his newborn baby girl. Sacrifices like this are made every day, and may we be reminded, that our FREEDOM comes with a cost, and our soldiers and their families are paying it."

As is all effective pro-war propaganda, this image is indeed a stirring one, putting the spotlight on those he leaves behind, portraying his noble sacrifice for the greater good rather than the deception that puts this young man in harms way and daily threatens any chance of ever seeing his baby again.

Would he still make this sacrifice if he knew he wasn’t protecting our “freedom”? That he wasn’t “making the world safer” for that precious baby girl of his? That he is merely a pawn in some rich man’s wars?

I doubt it.

The only reason he’s leaving this little girl is because he’s been lied to.

And if we owe them anything it’s not gratitude or respect, not worshi ppingthe lies they’re fighting and dying for, but rather to inform and remind of these deceptions in hopes that some, even one of them will do the right thing, instead.

At least 4 officers were involved in the gang beating of Weekly, and it’s on YouTube thanks to some quick-thinking bystanders, who unfortunately captured it as a dreaded “vertical video”

Regardless of whatever happened leading up to this, it is pretty clear that the three officers have a handle on Weekly, who is semi-restrained, prostrate, and pinned by two of them, by the time this video cuts in.

Yet at the 22-second mark of this video, you can CLEARLY see one officer wind up and punch Weekly in the face. Regardless of whatever happened leading up to this, that last punch is unarguably criminal battery and that fucking pig should lose his job and benefits, and be charged accordingly.

By the end of the video there are perhaps a dozen police officers or more. At least four of them are trying to usher the onlookers further and further away, keeping the camera as far from the incident as possible. Whatever started this incident, it’s probably safe to assume that it wasn’t worth 12 cops and loads of paperwork and a video about to go viral portraying the Venice PD as just the next group of thugs in uniform.

Keep electing candidates that keep waging wars and I’ll keep reminding you of the blood on your hands.

H/T Brand Spangler

• The gun control folks like to suggest that if only nobody had guns, incidents like this would never happen.

Fair enough, but back here in the real world, we understand that “no guns” is not a possibility (mass shootings continue to happen in countries with very strict firearms laws). Firearms are merely a convenient scapegoat that allow us to feel less powerless over situations where we really are quite powerless. Laws against guns are not going to prevent the next psycho from obtaining some, or building a bomb, or something else, just as laws against murder didn’t stop this guy. That’s a perspective that most people ignore.

And although fewer guns, or harder-to-get guns may prevent some incidents like this, the calculus is not favorable overall. In the US, there are between 1 million and 2 million incidents each year where a firearm is used defensively. Even if disarming everybody was within the realm of possibility (which it is not) disarming everybody because there is a 1 in 350,000,000 chance that some ordinary law-abiding grad student goes postal and kills a few people is likely to result in a lot more deaths.

• The pro-gun folks, hopped up on internet bravado, will posture some hero fantasy about self-defense and how a few armed citizens would’ve thwarted this attack.

Bollocks. Tactically speaking, there’s little reason to believe that a handful of uncoordinated theatergoers packing Colt 1911′s or S&W Model 10′s would’ve stood much of a chance to resolve the Aurora incident with less bloodshed.

Aurora was a well-calculated ambush; the environment chosen deliberately to ensure minimal immediate opposition, overwhelming firepower plus the element of surprise created panic and confusion, ensuring maximum casualties. It’s important to keep this in perspective, too. Even adequately equipped professionals acting in unison would have had some difficulty in such a scenario.

It’s important that we not allow what happened in Aurora to color our worldview. What happened in Aurora is literally a “27 Ninjas” scenario. It is such a fantastic, extraordinarily rare and unpredictable occurence that any conclusions we might hope to draw from the experience are unlikely to be of much value when transposed on to every day real-world situations.

Remember this? Happened right down the street, so to speak.

What happened in Aurora this morning, may not have been prevented or mitigated by a better-armed citizenry, but it’s the only chance they could’ve had, and it was taken from them by the “good intentions” of policies the effects of which always amount to victim disarmament and piles of dead bodies.

This should be the ONLY ARGUMENT YOU EVER NEED AGAINST GUN-FREE ZONES. Unfortunately it will be spun by anyone with an anti-gun agenda to push or axe to grind as they clamor for even more control, more regulation, and more restriction.

And more unarmed victims.

And more piles of dead bodies.