Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Please help as you can

Hurricane Katrina has caused untold devestation to parts of the Southeastern US.

Please visit The American Red Cross and donate as you can. Or please pick another charity. If you happen to think one is better than another, let me know which and why.

Friday, August 26, 2005

Scary Math

The deficits don't really bug me as much as it seems to bug CBS, but the sheer dollar amount really is staggering. A federal budget of $2.4T is:

$200 Billion a month
$6 1/2 Billion a day
$274 Million an hour
$4 1/2 Million a minute
$76 Thousand a second

... er .. roughly

Makes me really wish the Federal Gov't was not so omni-present in our lives in favor of a more States based system... which I believe most of our Founding Fathers anticipated our 'union' to be... not the 'central government'. Blame the New Deal. And the judges who allowed it.

Thursday, August 25, 2005

This just struck me funny

From Drudge: The AP seems distressed. But here's Drudge's 'rebuttal'.

Gore used 65,600 some gallons of jet fuel to speak at a 'global warming' conference in Japan? That's enough fuel (jet fuel no less) to drive my big lifted 9 mpg 454 Suburban over 585,000 miles...

Is Pat Robertson Crazy?

Many seem to think so.

Is he "un-Christian" to suggest that we "take out" a Marxist strongman spreading his evil throughout the Western Hemisphere (and apparently working with Iran even)?

Clearly we should not be in the business of running around knocking off leaders we don't agree with, but there may come a time when we wish we had. I wonder how different things would have turned out had Saddam Hussein been 'taken out' during the 70s/80s/90s. Or Fidel Castro...

Hugo Chavez seems very much in the mold of Saddam Hussein. Strongman/Tyrant who has nearly unlimited access to funds via oil production. Not a good combination.

Monday, August 22, 2005

My Box

My box consisted of 33 pages.

The first 30 refer to the Reagan Administration's appeal to the SCOTUS of the July 9, 1984 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit's decision finding certain Title I expenditures to be unconstitutional. In US Department of Education v. Betty-Louise Felton, the 2nd circuit found that Title I (education) funding for remedial students to be taught remedial classes by a public school teacher using public school remedial materials while located within a 'non public school' - which basically means religious. It had worked for 17 years in New York, but suddenly the 2nd Circuit found it to be defacto unconstitutional.

Roberts eloquently authors - on behalf of Counsel to the President, Fred F. Fielding - a comprehensive narrative describing the fundamentals of the case along with the reasons why the Supreme Court should immediately accept the appeal.

There is nothing striking in the document, other than the fact that is very competently written. There is certainly nothing surprising about a Reagan lawyer arguing on behalf of the Department of Education to save a the ability of the Federal government to continue to fund Title I projects in New York as they already had been for nearly two decades.

The largest surprise in what I read was the fact that the ACLU was not involved against to Department of Education... Maybe it was just behind the scenes.

The last 3 pages refer to crime legislation pending in the Congress. It discusses how the Senate had voted 91-1 to pass a comprehensive 46 part 'get tough on crime measure'. The House, on the other hand had taken a piecemeal approach and had 27 separate bills that were being bottled up by procedural maneuvers...

Hmmm... I'll have to go find out which party was in charge of which house of Congress. I have my suspicions as to which party would block tough crime reforms.

That's it. No smoking guns here.

Saturday, August 20, 2005

Assignment Received

Got it... Here is my box:

Box 16-JGR/(Department of Justice)DOJ Daily Reports (1) Link

My preliminary review is that this pertains to the US Department of Education v. Betty-Louise Felton which is a case I am unfamiliar with.

I should have a complete synopsis complete by the end of Monday.

Friday, August 19, 2005

John McCain

I have little use for John McCain. When was the last time he did something for us here in Arizona, rather than grandstanding in Alaska with Hillary Clinton? Has he heard, perhaps, that we have a small national security issue here related to our border security (or lack thereof).

Sean Hannity has been doing a great job just by being on the border and getting some national exposure to what we deal with on a daily basis here.

Hoping for an Assignment

After hearing the call go out on Hugh's show to take on pouring over a box of docs released by the Reagan Library pertaining to Judge Roberts, I was immediately frustrated that I was in my car and not at home. I thought the sensible thing to do would be to try to email from my phone so I could claim a box. Alas, my phone does not allow more that 60(?) characters per message. That's not very many. I ended up sending 2 emails and actually got one back that said something along the lines of "I got part of it, but have no idea who you are"...

I have since gotten home and emailed via an actual computer (I happen to have access to one in my house) and am anxiously awaiting an assignment that should prove fun, boring and interesting all at the same time.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

DT - The Courts

Mark Levin is right.

Our courts have seized power never intended for them while Congress sat on their hands and let them get away with it.

More to come.

DT - Federal Income Taxes

I have long followed Larken Rose and found his arguments and presentations compelling. He was recently charged with and even more recently convicted on 5 counts including 'wilfull failure to file' income taxes.

I am unsure how someone who believes they don't owe taxes can be found guilty of 'wilfull failure to file', when 'wilfull' means intentionally not filing when you know you have to. Larken believes the law (and has dedicated tremendous resources trying to elucidate his point) excludes what most other people believe to be 'taxable income'.

Hmmm. Not really sure where he's going to go from here (aside from the obvious appeals), but I hope he manages to continue his fight for a fair hearing of his beliefs.

First Light

Well. I finally wandered over to Blogspot from IraqtheModel and discovered that its as easy to set up as just about anything on the web. I had recently searched for a suitable url and found that americanfundamentalist.com was taken (by one of those stupid search engine things), however I was able to secure americanfundamentalist.us. My next step was finding blogging software and figuring out how to get it published. As a computer hardware near-expert, I have very little web publishing experience and frankly got slightly lost then distracted and haven't gotten back around to figuring it out.

This is obviously easier. Perhaps I will some day try to blog without these training wheels, but for now, this will suffice.