First, they did not "sit there and lie." Stare Decisis and "Settled Law" have been overturned time and again. I remember "Separate but Equal" which was more like "Separate but Unequal." That one was reversed. Justice Thomas did not violate the code of ethics. The Left just wishes to be rid of him and doesn't like the fact that he married a White woman who is even more conservative than he is and expresses herself loudly and frequently - which is her right as a private citizen. Sotomayor, on the other hand, publicly made the point that she does not believe in carrying out the duties of a Supreme Court Justice, preferring to take precedents from "foreign law." I suspect that the "foreign law" she follows will more resemble that of western Europe than that of the middle east. European precedents contain a lot of censorship and outlawing of "hate speech", such as a pub singer performing the song "Kung Fu Fighters." I suspect that people would be a lot more leery of a justice who wishes to use more "foreign precedents" if they thought the precedents would be from Saudi or Iran instead of Western Europe. Censorship, yes; beheading in the public square, no.

Most people who have never had to deal with wild animals don't think of such things. Pistols are also very useful against rapists and sexual murderers. Men also don't tend to think of such things. Marxists have always favored disarming the working class since an armed working class tends to get disgusted and rebel against Marxist leadership.

Exactly. The best part is when they try to ban things that don't even exist. My own favorite is the constant blather about "assault" this and that - when what they really mean are ugly firearms.

Seriously? I have heard that the Ruger single-action Super Blackhawk revolver works quite well, if you can drop the bear with the first round. For those who prefer double action revolvers, the Super Redhawk Alaskan or any of a number of Smith and Wesson .44 magnum wheelguns will do the job. Then, there are the various 1911 and 1911-A clones in .45 ACP, which have long been used in defense against grizzlies. The reason for short barreled firearms in defense against bears is sometimes one finds oneself in a situation where one literally needs a short barreled "get off me gun." Rifles and shotguns are not get off me guns.

Of course they do. That is why cities with the strictest gun laws (think Chicago!) have the highest crime rates.

California is attempting to use only renewable power. The problem is that both solar and wind are considered "unreliable power sources." California is already coping with power failures and shortages, and not all of them can be blamed on wildfires. California government seems to be composed of people who wander about with paper bags on their heads, as in addition to mandating all electric cars, some cities are mandating all electric housing. Meanwhile, the last nuclear electrical plant in the state is being kept open past its planned decommissioning date. It seems the governor noticed that if the nuclear plant is shut down, CA will have real problems when the sun is down or the wind isn't blowing. Can you imagine the fun of obeying the current state suggestions that one not fully charge one's electrical car - and then a wildfire breaks out and the power is shut off? Or how about living in the Sierras in winter and losing power in an all electric house? This is going to be good.

French is a dead language spoken by millions. The expressiveness of English is that it has absorbed all of the equivalents to "we go PX now, big boy" into regular vocabulary. Food words adopted from places the English invade include curry and succotash. Many words were borrowed completely: raccoon, opossum, skunk, moose. Interestingly, we find that mutton and beef are the meats, and sheep and cattle are the animals. I suspect this means that the Anglo-Saxon slaves and serfs took care of the animals, while the Norman French overlords were the ones who ate them.

Obama already decided that warrants were silly. Remember the stink about the capturing of telecommunications in SF? Or how about those convenient lying FBI agents who told tall stories to the FISA courts?

BTW - the alleged violations of your privacy that you describe are covered by the Fourth Amendment. Oh, wait, Obama decided to grab as many telecommunications as possible and the FBI seems to have had the very bad habit of lying to the FISA court that was supposed to be the source of those "warrants" to seize telecommunications.

Yawn. Roe wasn't well supported at all - suddenly killing fetuses became a matter of privacy. I suspect that if a registry was kept of women who had abortions, or there were waiting periods for abortions, or background checks to make sure the woman involved was stable enough to undergo an abortion, that the Left would scream bloody murder. But they sure demand all of that to exercise the enumerated right granted in the Second Amendment.' And the Democrats already crippled cryptography while you were standing around insisting that Roe v. Wade was about privacy.

Yes, let us repeal the Second Amendment. The Klan and ANTIFA would love it. Few people understand that we have already had "government backed militias" terrifying the public. The progressives, led by Woodrow Wilson and encouraged by Margaret Sanger (check out the photographs of her addressing the KKK women's auxiliary) were into eugenics; Wilson went so far as to segregate the Civil Service and fire Black supervisors as he believed that the allegedly superior Whites should never be supervised by "Negroes." The Klan rioted with police tolerance and in some cases with police assistance, helping to carry those wonderful "Progressive" values into practice. My own family fought a shooting war against the KKK when they threatened my grandfather with a lynching. My grandfather married the daughter of a converted Jew and was attacked for "race mixing." Most of his relatives were ordered to leave the county. Since we have the Second Amendment, the Klan decided it was "inconvenient" to lynch a man who shot back and to evict his relatives who also shot back. Even some of the local Catholics managed to stay in the area because they also shot back. It is not an accident that the first organization to call for nationwide gun control was the KKK. Nor is it an accident that the "Progressives" still wish to disarm and silence those who refuse to be cowed by threats and violence. The same can be said for the "progressive" murderers, looters, thieves, arsonists, and rapists of ANTIFA. In Portland, one of the ANTIFA rioters saw a man casually standing and watching. Instantly recognizing the man as a "Nazi" the ANTIFA member ran 20' to eliminate the "racist threat" who was standing, unarmed, and merely watching. The ANTIFA murderer insisted that the "Nazi" posed a threat to his person of color friend. Then there was the little incident where the victim was tried for allegedly being a Nazi murderer in Kenosha. It seems that after being beaten over the head with a skateboard, and having a pistol pointed at him by a convicted felon, and being attacked by another convicted felon who was yelling at him that he was going to kill him - he finally fought the man who attacked him when the man tried to grab his rifle. Amazingly enough, the prosecutor tried to redefine self-defense in order to support his claim of "murder" against Rittenhouse for shooting the man who had grabbed his rifle. Far from being a racist who deliberately went across state lines to allegedly attack Black people, Rittenhouse was trapped in Kenosha and unable to return home from his job as a lifeguard at a Kenosha pool. His nefarious activities included cleaning up damage to his old school in Kenosha, and defending an automotive business owned by persons of color. It was at the automotive business where he was hit over the head and given a concussion, and attacked by a convicted felon who attempted to take his rifle while another convicted felon pointed a pistol at him. Amazingly, the convicted felon who pointed the pistol admitted that he had lied to the police when he said he had no firearm - he suddenly remembered his pistol when the DA announced he intended to show a video of the situation. Indeed, he admitted that he had lied since his being a felon in possession of a firearm was yet another felony that he had committed and he really did not wish to go back to prison. The video was very clear: Rittenhouse was struck on the head with a skateboard (a method also used by a woman in LA to murder a randomly chosen victim), had a pistol pointed at him by one guy while another physically grappled with him, trying to get his rifle, while telling him he was going to kill him. Some in the media are still insisting that Kyle Rittenhouse was a vigilante who crossed state lines with an "assault" ugly gun to kill Black people. The only problem is that he didn't commit *any* crime. He tried to protect a family owned business from a predominantly White mob that screamed that they were acting like an invading band of barbarians because they were concerned about Black lives. ANTIFA, in good progressive militia fashion robbed, looted, and destroyed and burned - and, of course, attempted to commit murder. All of this with the support of the local government, with the police generally standing by and watching, and with a DA who attempted to prosecute a man, who survived at least two attempts to kill him, with murder for defending himself from one of the assailants who attempted to kill him.

Unfortunately, this is a valueless gesture. The reality is that China emits more greenhouse gases than the entire developed world combined, and is continuing to increase its emissions. Feel good ideas, such as "reducing dependence on fossil fuels" and "refusing to sell anthracite coal overseas" are exactly that - feel good ideas that harm the people of the developed world. China continues to build new coal powered electrical plants. China is perfectly happy to use its own "bunk" coal to fuel those plants. Our refusal to sell cleaner coal and cleaner coal technology doesn't bother the Chinese in the least. Indeed, the Chinese now produce most of the world's Kraft paper and the industry is more polluting than ever since the Chinese didn't bother with all of that emissions control crap. Indeed, the Chinese imported entire Kraft (AKA "pulp") plants from places such as Albany, OR in their progress to make China essentially the major manufacturing site of the world. While foolish people blather about banning fossil fuels (apparently they plan to plow with horses or oxen, fertilize with sewage, and replace novocaine with biting down on shell casings) the Chinese commitment to "global warming reduction" consists of agreeing to eventually "consider" their pollution and whether or not to reduce it or to just continue increasing it. Examining Chinese policies suggests that there is no foreseeable decline in Chinese pollution - and India is starting to openly share that perspective.

The US has stopped subsidizing public universities for the most part. Tuition that was once low enough, as recently as the early 1970s, to enable students to pay for most of their college by working at the minimum wage, has risen to exorbitant levels. Research grants and others from the government tend to involve favoring certain private universities. In Oregon, the state granted money to the extremely expensive "Oregon Graduate Center," a private institution while reducing funding to the state university system. Corporations no longer seem interested in funding universities or even student scholarships. Why should they when immigration policies encourage them to hire foreign workers who can be chained to the job by the terms of an H1-B visa? We are giving our future away to the home countries of the H1-Bs and denying our own people opportunities.

A guy with a rifle? Tell that to the Afghans. They drove the British out in the 19th C.; the Russians in the 20th; and the US and NATO in the 21st. Of course, governments love disarmed populations. My family had to fight a shooting war against the KKK in the 1910s-1920s. We aren't Black. My grandfather angered the KKK by marrying the daughter of a converted Jew. The KKK considered this to be "race mixing" and tried to lynch him, and run most of his relatives out of the county. The only thing that prevented this was being able to shoot back, which also saved some local Catholics. (This is the same KKK that in Oregon tried to outlaw cross breeding chickens as "miscegenation.") Under Woodrow Wilson, the KKK was much praised and admired by the genocidal eugenics fanatics of the "Progressive Movement." The police, the sheriffs, the elected officials in many places were members and supporters of the KKK. Look up Tulsa, OK, for a particularly flagrant, urban example of the movement. In other words, the KKK was the ANTIFA of the 1910s-1920s - permitted to burn, loot, murder and destroy while the police ignored or even protected them. In the US, the paramilitaries tend to belong to the Progressives, not the conservatives. Conservatives believe in law; progressives believe in ignoring the existing laws and writing those more to their convenience.

The US is third in murders in the world. If you remove Chicago, Detroit, Washington, DC, St. Louis, and New Orleans from the statistics, then the US is 189th out of the 193 countries in the world. Those cities are all ruled by liberal Democrats, and several have "strict" gun laws. Somehow this hasn't prevented them from being obscenely violent. Detroit allows people to have concealed carry permits; several national stories have covered cases where permit holders stopped attacks on themselves or others.