The Natural Perversity of Inantimate Objects

Today's little trip is a seven-mile run to the Ford dealership to determine if the F150 clutch transplant is completed. Then I can obey Horace Greeley. I shouldn't be here in Smugleye-on-Lake today. I should be approaching Three Forks. Yeah, maybe I should have seen it coming, but before I loaded the camper there wasn't the slightest hint of slipping.

Meanwhile, I submit that you don't read Reason magazine often enough. Me either, but I resolve to go there more often for things like this explanation of why the trouble with America is an excess 0f civility.

See You Later Allig ... (ZAP)

I'm sure Corb is a nice kid, a credit to rock and rollers everywhere, and fully deserving of his new scholarship. But I wish he'd explained the conundrum to the doowhackadoo photographer and editor. Solid body guitars need to be plugged in. Plugging them in while seated seaward of the waterline could result in a very short set.

L'etat, c'est WTF?

Read this and wonder how President Barack Obama could make this guy a czar of anything, much less of the regulatory function of the United States government -- even after we make allowance for the source, World Net Daily.

Cass Sunstein either means it or he doesn't when he writes: "There is no reason to believe that in the face of statutory ambiguity, the meaning of federal law should be settled by the inclinations and predispositions of federal judges. The outcome should instead depend on the commitments and beliefs of the President and those who operate under him."

Imagine how smoothly everything would work if President Obama and Regulatory Czar Sunstein sat down over a beer and decided how the Commerce Clause and the "general welfare" language of the Preamble should be interpreted.

For one thing it would save all that expense of the judicial branch of government. And maybe the legislative. If this nincompoop thinks Obama ought to be permitted to interpret the law, he might as well let the new Sun King make it in the first place.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the active governing class: This is why you scare us shitless, off our writing chairs and into the shops where ballistics in the lingua franca.

To put it as plainly as possible, Cass, we have a Constitution for the express purpose of keeping humans such as yourself where you belong, in a dim attic, unwashed, contemplating your navel, shunned in the full Mennonite manner by all to whom liberty is an idea not yet dead and monarchy is not the ideal to be desired.

(H/t to John of the GMA)

Royal Succession to Teddy Kennedy

It is a custom of monarchs to name their own successors, and most of they time they get away with doing so.

So it almost is in Massachusetts where the final act of hypocrisy in one of American history's most hypocritical political lives is underway.

You can read the AP link, but you probably already know the salient facts. Five years ago Sen. Edward M. Kennedy told the folks back home to repeal the law permitting the governor to name a replacement for a senator who dies. And of course, the people obeyed, Teddy being, after all, a Kennedy.

This summer, a dying Senator Kennedy had an epiphany and told the folks back home that his state deserved two voices in the Senate, therefore the governor must be permitted to name the successor to a senator who dies.

And so this morning the folks back home, speaking through a legislature dominated by the Joe Kennedy/Tip O'Neill Democratic machine, plan to "debate" the Kennedy deathbed edict.

Some lonesome and honest soul in that lawmaking body will certainly be rude enough to wonder aloud if the late senator's call from the grave might have the teeniest motivation of a Republican governor in 2004 and a pliant machine Democrat in 2009.

That Bay State Diogenes will then be attacked as a right-wing toady to Rush Limbaugh. He will be pilloried for sullying the Kennedy legacy which, as everyone knows, exemplifies the American virtues of selflessness, decorum, and modesty in all facets of their lives, public and private.

And if that isn't the truth I'll kiss your arse on the quarterdeck of the U.S.S. Constitution and foot the bill for a video uplink to the teevee satellite of your choice.