Only a lawyer could view a mandate as a tax. A tax on living.

ObamaCare upheld. Thank you, Chief Justice Roberts, for your idiotic decision. If a law is constitutional & not @ the same time, how can it be upheld?

A dilemma

How do I tell a well-meaning but ill-informed teenage Facebook friend of mine that she and the Washington Post seem to be unaware of the difference between outsourcing and off-shoring?

Sorry, life isn't fair

Hmm

President Obama took executive action removing the fear of deportation for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

Can we say reportedly, here?  Since they came to the U.S. illegally, we have no means of verifying their story.  Guess we just take the word of somebody who violated the immigration laws of our country, huh?

The policy makes sense. Many of the immigrants impacted by the action are hard-working people who are contributing and will continue to contribute to the strength of our country.

Except they cut in line.  And if they're not being paid under the table, their employer has submitted W-2s with either a bogus or stolen social security number.  If it's the latter, then it's identity theft, meaning some poor slob has just become a victim in what I've heard some argue is a victimless crime.
  

Romney, whose stance on immigration has been evolving since January when he said immigrants should “return home, apply and get in line with everyone else,” now finds it difficult in the general election to oppose the merits of a plan such as the one Obama initiated.

One little word is everything.  Romney was talking about the illegal immigrants getting in line with everybody else.  You know, the ones whom as legally immigrating!

Romney and friends know that winning support from Hispanic voters will dim significantly if Republicans are seen as advocates for the forcible removal of children, college students and young adults who are law-abiding members of the American community.

I wouldn't be so quick to assume that's how Hispanic voters feel about it.  If you waited in line like everyone else, would you be so quick to forgive the line-cutter?  Plus, let's not paint all these illegal immigrants with the same brush.  Some are members of violent gangs such as MS-13.  Some, like this guy, may be hard workers, but they are also murderers:

On Wednesday, Carlos Cardenas, 22, with the help of a Spanish interpreter, pleaded guilty to strangling his wife's 15-year-old sister while raping her in his bathroom last year. He later dumped the girl's body in an apple orchard in Orleans County where the illegal alien was once employed.

Or this guy:

A modern-day Jack the Ripper who admitted that he “wanted to kill” a Queens woman he viciously murdered was sentenced yesterday to up to 29 years in prison.
Huang Chen, 49, an illegal immigrant from China, admitted he murdered his former employment agent by tying a plastic rope around her neck and smashing her head with a hammer 30 times.
Chen showed no remorse as he was sentenced for the 2010 killing of Qian Wu.

Sorry, not all of them are hard workers.  And their willingness to cut in line and cheat makes me question their integrity and honesty.

A matter of feelings or a matter of law?

The Des-Moines Register editorials are often long on "fairness" and short on facts.

Today, there's this gem of thought:

The Supreme Court in 2009, to great fanfare and congratulations by civil libertarians, ruled that terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo have a constitutional right to challenge their imprisonment in U.S. federal courts. This fundamental right of habeas corpus — that is, the right of prisoners to be able to challenge their confinement before a judge — applies to Guantanamo detainees, too.

The court was not clear on precisely what legal standards apply, however. It left the details to the lower federal courts. That has fallen to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington. The court has yet to approve an appeal from Guantanamo, and the Supreme Court has consistently refused to second-guess the lower court. Last week, for example, the Supreme Court summarily dismissed appeals from six Guantanamo detainees.

That the SCOTUS agreed to hear the case in 2009 baffles me.  These terrorists were foreign nationals captured on a foreign battlefield.  They wore no insignia or uniform declaring them to be soldiers in a military force (I'll get back to why that's significant).  They're not U.S. citizens, so why grant them the same rights?

About the only way you could argue for constitutional protections for these individuals is to refer to treaty law.  Is the foreign national a citizen of a nation with whom we have a treaty?  More importantly, do they declare themselves a citizen of that nation, or have they renounced their citizenship?  Terrorists that dislike the U.S. often don't like governments that would stoop so low as to have a treaty with the U.S.

Closing Guantanamo, which has now operated for more than a decade, will not be a simple task. There is the matter of finding another country that will take those detainees who can be released beyond our borders. There is the matter of prosecuting the remaining terrorist suspects, where the government has evidence not obtained by torture. There is the matter of deciding whether they can be prosecuted in U.S. civil courts or in military tribunals. Then there is the problem of finding a more permanent prison on U.S. soil for those who cannot be deported or tried.

There are two schools of thought on terrorism.  Conservatives by and large see terrorism as an act of war, while liberals see it as a criminal act.  If we're going to prosecute terrorists as criminals, that's great, but first should we let them all go and wait for them to enter our country willingly?  Isn't it a jurisdictional issue to seize them on a foreign battlefield and try them in American courts on American soil?

Then there's that word:  torture.  I can think of few words so overused and loosely re-defined to encompass practices which a great many legally-minded people think do not go too far.  Often, I hear pundits use the word, presumably because it feels like torture to them.  Never mind the legal definitions.

At least the author touches on the obvious elephant in the room, even if the question isn't explicitly asked:  If the Bush administration did indeed torture these individuals with newfound rights, how can we prosecute them with evidence obtained under what was once called "torture".  Legal scholars refer to such evidence as "fruit of the poison tree."

Finally, the last line of the above paragraph stuns me with irony:  The author seems to acknowledge the "need" to stick some of these terrorists in a hole in the ground and provide them free food and medical care for the rest of their lives, even though he or she has been advocating for how wrong it is for Camp X-Ray Delta to exist.  Sorry, which is it?

At the time of this post, there are three comments.  Two are reasoned, factual arguments against the premise of the editorial, but then there's this:

The continued existence of a facility like Guantanamo testifies to how afraid many Americans have become of trusting their own constitution, or of respecting their treaty obligations in the Geneva Conventions. Fear is becoming a fundamental "value."

Like I said, there's a large number of people who like to throw the word "torture" around casually.  About the same number seem to cite the Geneva Conventions without actually knowing what it has to say about enemy combatants that don't distinguish themselves from the civilian populace (such as fighting in civilian clothing, wearing no insignia to identify them as soldiers of a military force, not carrying arms openly, etc).  Scholars accept that such individuals have the right to be shot on sight.

What part of "Do not disturb" do some people not comprehend?

One year since I met a wonderful woman. Happy anniversary, T.

Why are so many meetings scheduled 90 mins beforehand?

It's such a simple concept, putting 4 wheels between 2 lines...