Scrubbing the Evidence

The Election Law Blog posts a statement from the Obama administration, regarding their egregious failure to verify the identifies of donors on their web site.

They purport they they rely on "a manual process to review any transaction flagged by AVS, also taking into account other fraud risk factors, and using fraud detection services provided by our credit card processor." Of course, this is bunk on stilts to anyone familiar with e-commerce transactions.

The Obama campaign refunded my own example transaction on 5/1/2012 -- nearly a full month after the donation was paid out. It's pretty obvious to me that they realized they were getting heat about this issue and decided to go through their transaction logs and refund the most egregious examples.

OK, Think About What You Just Wrote

In an otherwise good story on plans by the USPS to avoid closing many rural post offices, the reporter offers up this gem of a paragraph:

Among the concerns of rural residents is they lack reliable Internet service, so they must depend on letters and packages for such important items as mail-order prescription drugs.

I rely heavily on a small rural post office: the mailbox at the end of my driveway got knocked down so many times I got tired of putting it back up, and it's a terrible place to hold packages. They're not safe and it's hard to keep anything sizable out of the weather at the end of my 150-yard-long farm driveway. So I have all my mail come to a PO Box at the nearby post office. It's a tiny branch that's had the same two lovely ladies on staff since I moved out here about 18 years ago.

I also have very poor internet service. There is absolutely no suitable broadband option available to me -- no cable and no DSL, and the nature of my work makes satellite internet untenable.

But apparently I'm farther behind the times than I thought! If I'm interpreting that paragraph correctly, if you have reliable internet service, you don't have to depend on letters and packages for such important items as mail-order prescription drugs! Apparently, with cutting-edge reliable, internet service you can actually receive your mail-order prescription drugs through the internet! What an amazing world we live in!

The Next Step In TSA Security Procedures

Welcome, travelers to Anthony Weiner International Airport! Please remove your underwear and place it in a plastic bin for screening!

A Man "almost without any skills at all."

"In his 224-page book, Wilson can’t solve the mysteries ... such as how a man “almost without any skills at all” ruined a nation." A book about Obama? Not quite. Or, maybe.

Government Without Limits

You don't have to fantasize about what it would be like. You can see it in action all over the world today, including and especially in one of the world's biggest economic powers.

Chen Guangcheng case puts pressure on Chinese activists

 "I think that after the Chen Guangcheng incident, the situation for us will just become worse and worse, because in today's society government power has no limits," said Liu Yi, an artist and supporter of Chen.

"Government power has no limits." If only there was a country that had a constitution the put strict, defined limits on government power, to protect its people. If only we could compare life there with life under governments with unlimited power.

I wonder what Chen Guangcheng and Lui Yi would think of Tom Friedman's wish to have the U.S. have China's form government for a day. The totalitarian urge is alive and well in the U.S. Thanks Tom, and all your fellow travelers.

I'm being sarcastic, but this is not idle snark or exercise. In the case of Obamacare's individual mandate, now before the Supreme Court, one thing that struck both justices and observer's was the administration's lawyer's inability to articulate a limiting principle for government authority. Basically, once the government can force you to buy products, there's very little it can't force you to do, no area of human existence, from cradle to grave, that doesn't fall within government's sphere.

The modern leftist interpretation of the Constitution is of a government with expansive powers over people with a limited number of protected rights.

Contrast that to the founder's vision, of a government with limited, defined powers and citizens with a vast, expansive assumption of rights and retained powers (See the Federalist Papers and the Constitution itself, Article I, section 8, and the ninth and tenth amendments).

The farther we drift from that original foundation, the more like China we become. And that isn't a good thing, in case you weren't paying attention.

UPDATE: I just read an article where a Harvard biology professor recommends government-mandated exercise. Harvard is a trend-setter in legal and social thought. So, the fact that statements like this are originating there is very troubling. It means senior faculty there have abandoned any respect for limited government:

Lieberman, who chairs the Human Evolutionary Biology Department, said the cascading effects on human health and medical costs are so catastrophic that government should require exercise just as it mandates vaccinations and other public health measures.

Men and women live longer now than ever before. We are larger and live healthier later in life than ever, but still any perceived defect in our health regimens is treated as "catastrophic." Never let a crisis go to waste, right?

Exactly How Is This a Threat to Our Homeland?

Rare white buffalo sacred to some in Native American community killed and skinned

This is certainly a sad story and I hope the perpetrators are captured and prosecuted for animal cruelty or destruction of the rancher's property or whatever charges are accurate and appropriate. But note this line:

Sheriff Randy Meeks said he was notified of the crime by Texas Parks and Wildlife. His office is investigating with the help of the Department of Homeland Security and the National Indian Council.

The Department of Homeland Security? Really? Exactly what do buffalo killings have to do with homeland security? Do our federal agencies even pretend that there are jurisdictional limits on their powers anymore?

I was already of the opinion that the DHS is one of the most useless bureaucracies ever created. We already had the Department of Defense (what are they defending, if not our homeland?), the National Security Agency (presumably protecting the security of our nation, a.k.a. homeland), and the FBI (a law enforcement agency tasked with enforcing federal law within our homeland), not to mention probably a dozen other agencies that stick their fingers in every aspects of our domestic lives. Now I'm sure DHS is useless, if it's assisting in investigating buffalo killings.

These Colors Don't Run ... Or Burn

My comment on a Corner post about a little dust-up over the latest revival of idiotic talk about an anti-flag-burning amendment:

The very passion of those who support anti-flag-burning amendments is, ironically, the strongest argument against such an amendment.

"Burning an American flag is conduct — not speech," James Carey, says. Well, will the amendment prohibit the burning of all squares of cloth? Because that's the behavior. Is someone likely to be extremely upset if I go burn my pillow case?

But the flag is not, of course, just a pillowcase, not just a square of cloth. It's a symbol. It's an idea. That's why burning it is such powerful speech. It communicates, succinctly, utter disrespect for this nation and for the men who fought and died so that you'd have the freedom to desecrate the symbol many of them fought under. It's despicable. And that's exactly why it has to be protected.

People who burn flags are generally America-hating political dissidents. We do not find excuses to criminalize the expressions of our political dissidents in this nation. Leave that to China. Ask Chen Guangcheng about that.

If the ideals the flag symbolizes are as good and worthy as we think they are, then America-haters can burn a truckload of flags and never weaken a stitch of the real fabric this nation is made from.