monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

My god. A bit of sanity in an otherwise insane point in time.

Appeals Court Rules that Second Amendment Doesn’t Protect Right to Assault Weapons

So your erroneous notion "It shows that those who have "ruled" know nothing about guns or how they function" has no merit.

When I went to college back in the mid 90's, "black power" was the in thing. Do you recall the dashiki and the leather "Africa" medallion? They weren't new when I was in school and they won't be new in 5 years when they come back into "resistance style",

...15-year-old Sergio Hernandez was just steps from the border on Mexican soil when he was killed in 2010 by Jesus Mesa Jr., an agent standing on the American side in El Paso, Texas.

The federal agent was not prosecuted, and the U.S. refused to extradite him to Mexico.

The issues for the court are whether the officer enjoys immunity from such claims of excessive force, and whether the victim enjoyed limited constitutional protections, even though he was not a U.S. citizen.

"This an urgent matter of separation of powers for us to respect the duty that the principle rule the executive and the legislative have with respect to foreign affairs," said Justice Anthony Kennedy. "This is one of the most sensitive areas of foreign affairs where the political branches should discuss with Mexico what the solution ought to be."

Here's what ya get when ya aint go no border wall, eh?

From what I've heard, the military has seen an increase in both size and intelligence in soldiers going through basic training compared to 30-40 years ago.

More evidence that liberals hate America's Constitution and our Freedom.

A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked Texas from cutting off Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood, ruling the state had presented no credible evidence to support claims the organization violated medical or ethical standards related to abortion procedures.

Prosecutors in Ukraine are investigating whether a member of Parliament committed treason by working with two associates of President Trump’s to promote a plan for settling Ukraine’s conflicts with Russia.

In a court filing on Tuesday, prosecutors accused the lawmaker, Andrii V. Artemenko, of conspiring with Russia to commit “subversive acts against Ukraine,” in particular by advancing a proposal that could “legitimize the temporary occupation” of the Crimean peninsula. Russia forcibly annexed the peninsula in 2014, a step that Ukraine, the United States and other governments have refused to recognize; Mr. Artemenko said his proposal would allow Ukraine to formally cede control of the territory to Russia, at least temporarily

...Mr. Artemenko traveled to New York in January to discuss the plan with Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and with Felix H. Sater, a Russian-American business associate of the Trump Organization who scouted business opportunities in Russia for the company as recently as 2015. Mr. Cohen said he delivered the proposal to the White House in a sealed envelope in early February.

Why start a civilian arms race? Actually it's well under way, but why promote it?

The conservative movement in America now belongs to President Trump.

Thousands of activists will arrive in Washington this week for an annual gathering that will vividly display how Trump has pushed the Republican Party
and the conservative movement toward an “America first” nationalism that has long existed on the fringes.

“Every movement that gets dusty or sclerotic relies on an infusion of energy from the bottom up,” said White House counselor Kellyanne Conway. “It also takes a transformative individual to bring about change".

...Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally who has given a series of speeches recently on “Trumpism,” said he is “impressed that CPAC has very intelligently anticipated the direction that Trump is going to take the country and understood that he’ll be the dominant voice on the right for the foreseeable future.”

In keeping with the broader themes of our political moment, Yiannopoulos is less a conservative than a fellow traveler who vexes liberals for profit.

Yiannopoulos’s embrace of the Gamergate backlash against the diversity movement in video games helped make him a media figure in the United States, but it seemed like a canny calculation rather than a genuine commitment. His outrageous statements about everything from Jewish control of the media to the Black Lives Matter movement to transgender people have long seemed less the product of a genuine worldview than a search for buttons to press, accompanying the jabs with naughty snickers. To regard him as genuinely politically conservative requires ignorance of conservative principles. To see his act as outrageous rather than derivative requires an unfamiliarity with subjects including art and gay history.

...The real currency of Yiannopoulos’s tour wasn’t speaking fees. It was ginning up the protests that would make for flashy documentary footage and stoking the controversy that has made someone like Ann Coulter a right-wing publishing mainstay. If the entire case for your importance is that you make a certain class of people angry, then you have to keep making those people angry, upping the rhetorical ante all the way, to preserve the sense that you are “dangerous” and thus capable of moving books and movie tickets.

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More evidence that liberals hate America's Constitution and our Freedom.

More evidence of the problems that occur when an 18th Century anachronism becomes enshrined and firearms become a fetish for the fearful.

But seriously, constitutional interpretation aside, why are military-styled weapons, which are designed to throw out a lot of lead (inaccurately) in a short period of time necessary for purposes of self-defense? Why start a civilian arms race? Actually it's well under way, but why promote it?

Quote:

In a court filing on Tuesday, prosecutors accused the lawmaker, Andrii V. Artemenko, of conspiring with Russia to commit “subversive acts against Ukraine,”

NYT
More than a tad bizarre, all this.

Mr. Artemenko...has not been arrested or formally charged with a crime. The Ukrainian news outlet Strana.ua quoted him as saying that the investigation was “politically motivated.” He has also claimed to have evidence of corruption that could help lead to the ouster of the Ukrainian president, Petro O. Poroshenko.

“I’m not going anywhere, and will meet with investigators to explain my position,” he was quoted as saying.

The Trump administration is working to undo an Obama-era directive that allows students to use school restrooms that correspond with their gender identity, the White House said Tuesday.

The White House will insist that schools must protect all students and the undoing of the directive “does not diminish the protections" available to all students.

... one state-- North Carolina-- has enacted a law restricting students' bathroom access to their sex at birth. Other states are considering following suit.

Second, there's an elective affinity, even a tight fit, between the originalism of duresse oblige and Scalia's idea of the game. And that is Scalia's vision of what the good life entails: a daily and arduous struggle, where the only surety, if we leave things well enough alone, is that the strong shall win and the weak shall lose. Scalia, it turns out, is not nearly the iconoclast he thinks he is. Far from telling "people what they don't like to hear," as he claims, he tells the power elite exactly what they want to hear: that they are superior and that they have a seat at the table because they are superior.