My goodness, I think someone has hacked into the hotmail account I set up for this blog. Apparently the few bloggers that I've e-mailed have received a strange e-mail from my account with nothing more than a web address as its content. I wonder why.
Anyway, if you have received a strange e-mail from the hotmail address listed on the side of my blog, I apologize. Please ignore it, it's not actually from me. Now I have to figure out if I should just change my password, or get a whole new account.
...and doing that pretty much took up all my morning. Gah. I think it was just a phishing scam. I hope that's fixed it. If anyone gets a strange e-mail from me, please let me know.
I had such an annoying day yesterday too. It's coming on that time of the month and consequently, I'm craving potato chips. Such was my steely resolve not to eat them that I escaped from my shopping trip without any.
However, on the way home I was kicking myself for not getting a bag and determined that I would make them from scratch. I wanted them that badly.
Alas. The potatoes turned out to have putrefied. The smell of rotten potatoes lingered on in the kitchen for the next hour. Thwarted, I tried making a cheese dip with Velveeta and salsa. That turned out badly.
I ended up eating half the bag of tortilla chips with salsa mixed with sour cream and then an entire bag of kettle corn.
I should have just gotten a bag of the damned potato chips.
We still haven't heard back from the doctor's office, even though I left them a message, as instructed. That was yesterday around eleven am and they were suppose to call back within twenty four hours, but not so much. Maybe they have a high volume of test results. Their waiting room was quite crowded when I went in for my appointment.
I left them a second message today, so I hope to hear back soon.
Politically speaking...
I read this article this morning. I've copied much of it, what I thought were key points to myself, but I highly recommend reading the entire thing.
"...insidiously, the law itself is becoming negotiable — or rather, it is becoming subservient to what elite overseers at any given time determine is a higher calling of social change.
"...seldom in memory have we seen such a systematic attack on our framework of laws as the present assault from the executive branch..."
He then goes on to give specific examples of this, such as:
"Federal immigration statutes mandate a clearly defined American border, which aliens may not cross without authorization. Yet the Obama administration not only does not fully enforce those statutes (in this regard, it is not behaving much differently from the prior administration), but also is preparing to sue the state of Arizona for implementing enforcement that follows the intent of neglected federal laws on the books...
"Recently, as if on cue, the secretary of labor, Hilda Solis, produced a video advising workers to contact her office should they feel that they have been shorted wages by their employers. Fair enough. But then she goes on to explicitly include workers who are not documented and to promise them confidentiality, i.e., de facto federal protection for their illegality: “Every worker has a right to be paid fairly, whether documented or not.”
"She rightly promises to pursue lawbreaking employers, but quite wrongly not to pursue lawbreaking employees.
"Yet when we become unequal before the law, the entire notion of a lawful society starts to erode. If Secretary Solis has decided that lawbreaking aliens can in confidence count on her protection, then can those who don’t pay their taxes (perhaps citing some sort of prejudice) likewise find exemption from Treasury Secretary Geithner? Can citizens pick and chose their particular compliances — run red lights, but still want shoplifters arrested? Break the speed limit, but insist that cars stop at crosswalks? Do questions of race, class, and gender determine the degree to which the federal government considers enforcing existing law?
"Recently in Port Chester, N.Y., a federal judge made a mockery of the concept of one man, one vote. Apparently the magistrate felt that Hispanics in Port Chester needed help to elect someone with whom they can identify along racial lines. So, to ensure the election of an Hispanic to the village Board of Trustees, the judge created a system of cumulative voting. Each voter was given six votes, and the explicit hope was that Hispanics would give all their votes to Hispanic candidates, voting on the basis of race rather than policy. Now we hear this may well become a precedent that the federal government will use to ensure diversity elsewhere.
"Now there is talk of an executive decree from the Environmental Protection Agency to implement provisions of cap-and-trade legislation that Congress will not pass. Republican senators are already worried that the administration will likewise simply begin to grant amnesty to illegal aliens en masse, without introducing such a proposal to Congress, which alone has the right and responsibility to make our laws. And the recent executive order to ban all offshore drilling in the Gulf clearly circumvented the legal process. (Does the government have the right to shut down every flight if one airplane crashes, or to mothball all nuclear plants should one leak?)
"What do all these ends-justify-the-means examples portend? Mostly, they reflect an effort by a technocratic class to implement social change through extralegal means if it finds that its agenda does not meet with public approval. In some sense, the Obamians have lost all faith that our democracy shares their vision, and so they seek to impose their exalted will by proclamation — as if they are the new Jacobins and America is revolutionary France throwing off the old order.
"Note the logic of all this. Federal officials determine a supposed good and then find the necessary way to achieve it. The law be damned. “Diversity,” unions, environmentalism — any of these anointed causes trumps the staid idea of simply following the letter of the law."
-Victor David Hanson, "The Law? How Quaint!" The National Review Online, June 25, 2010
