1. The law that applies you.
2.The law that doesn’t apply to the politically connected.
Interesting to me that despite breaking many federal laws regarding the removal and handling of fetuses, no one has brought charges against Planned Parenthood. However, those filming the breaking of the law are being charged.
Grand jury indicts 2 behind Planned Parenthood videos
I guess their political connection aren’t up to snuff.
And this, from Glenn Reynolds:
Forecast of distrust with a chance of revolution
“Then there’s the official lawlessness. The IRS, hiding from investigations that it targeted Tea Party groups, keeps “accidentally” destroying hard drives. Hillary’s emails also keep mysteriously disappearing, and now the State Department has used the blizzard as an excuse for not producing court-ordered emails, though it’s known about the order for months. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, former attorney general Michael Mukasey says that Hillary should face criminal charges, but who really expects that? She’s politically untouchable, which says bad things about the rule of law.”
The ‘elite’ break whatever laws they wish and laugh in your face, as do politically connected people and organizations like PP. Assuming a Republican wins the next presidential election, will there be an accounting? Should there be? Of what sort? What would reestablish the Rule of Law among the political elite?
Related: Immigrant Mob Attacks French Family
“The mob can be seen hurling objects at the family before one of the men within the house emerges with an air rifle to ward them off. The man was later taken into custody by police, but has been released while the regional prosecutor considers whether to pursue a case against him.”
Note who got arrested and who did not.
Better, here anyway, to be “tried by 12 than carried by 6.” France, I don’t know.
Where ever and whenever governments exist there are always two set of laws – one set for the ruler and his cronies and one set for the people. Further it is impossible to change the fact that there are 2+ sets of laws.
This was true when the American revolution took place – 1776. So the revolutionaries created a constitution which allowed these two sets of laws. But they created a federal government with no ruling powers and state governments with full powers. The idea was that if a state government made unjust laws, then the people could leave and live in another state. Therefore states would compete with each other for citizens by having good laws.
Similarly if the Federal government made really bad laws, the states could simply leave the federation and join a new one. The 1860 civil war eliminated this option for a while. Then the feds used MLK to eliminate states’ rights and make federal law became universal. Now citizens can not escape oppression by moving to a different state or even by leaving the USA completely.
This is why Trump is popular. Trump is not a member of the ruling establishment. The establishment opposes him. Maybe Trump can restore the original 1776 balance between state and federal governments. All the other candidates are establishment cronies who love special laws for rulers and regular laws for the serfs.
It’s interesting that the barons who extracted Magna Carta from the King demanded protection not only for their own rights, but also for the rights of all free men. According to WKPD, this was extended in the next century: “Magna carta cum statutis angliae (Great Charter with English Statutes), early 14th-century. … In particular the third statute, in 1354, redefined clause 29, with “free man” becoming “no man, of whatever estate or condition he may be”, and introduced the phrase “due process of law” for “lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land”.
If Trump becomes president there will be no other course but a clear, stark separation of powers between the government branches. Everyone hates him so much on both sides that no one will work with him.
Congress will grant him and the executive agencies as little power as possible. Who knows, they may even start to pass laws that are succinct and coherent enough to actually do something without requiring convoluted definitions and redefinitions by armies of bureaucrats.
The Intentionalist majority on the Supreme Court will peer into his heart and determine that they will need to watch over Trump’s intentions like a hawk. Precedents from executive branch legal counsel will go out the window. They’ll suddenly discover that it may not be such a great idea to allow the President to ignore and defy Congressional statutes, something they decided was a fine for Obama. It’s not a coincidence that they’ve now decided to rule whether Obama’s executive order on immigration is violating the “take care” clause since Trump took the lead for the White House.
It is a good idea to read Magna Carta in the original medieval latin (use Medieval Latin Wordlist to look up words created in England after Cicero died).
Re: the PP tapes: The comments at USA Today are nauseating. Note the number of rainbow-colored LGBT tags defending Planned Parenthood and maligning anyone who breaks The Narrative.
Don’t forget that it was Houston’s lesbian mayor that subpeonaed every church in town, to make sure their sermons wouldn’t speak against a new city ordnance letting gelded men in dresses into the ladies’ room. Don’t forget it was in Dallas where Debbie Davis supporters chanted HAIL SATAN and threw used tampons at pro-life protesters.
The blue-state fascists are everywhere, and their grip on society is metastasizing.
Keep stockpiling. There’s still time.
>> Don’t forget it was in Dallas where Debbie Davis supporters chanted HAIL SATAN and threw used tampons at pro-life protesters.
You could stop that by fining everyone involved and charging them with assault. But that’s a Progressive town, so more of that selective application of the law again. It’s applied to the letter when it benefits the powerful and their friends, it’s ignored otherwise. We have regressed to the point where the law and its enforcers are no different from the medieval days of the sheriff acting as the king’s enforcer, and solely for his benefit.
The men in dresses don’t even have to be gelded.
And in view of what has been said so far on this thread, who can have any belief that the FBI “investigation” of the massive espionage committed by Hillary Rodham Clinton has any chance of being influenced by the actual law instead of the will of the Executive Branch?
Or that Gowdy’s investigation of Benghazi will find any fault with the regime?
Having the law on your side is good, as far as it goes. In a system without a rule of law, having power is better. Which has certain implications.
You have to deal with the facts on the ground, not what you want them to be.
One of the biggest blind spots that the more naive followers of statist ideas have is the pervasive corruption that an expansive state not only allows, but actually encourages.
Tthe statist insiders who know how the game is really played understand very well that one of the primary motivators towards its continued power seeking is to create further opportunities for graft, and greater protections against the operations of any method of holding people accountable for either civil or criminal penalties.
We are long overdue for a political realignment, several of which have occurred in our history, as parties and factions have come and gone. As I have said before, I believe the country is very close to the levels of dissatisfaction and estrangement previously found in the 1850’s.
We are in a very perilous time, which I feel will peak at the 2020 election cycle, partly in reaction to what does or doesn’t happen this year.
It would help enormously if our younger people had some historical sense of how we got here, but the ship has sailed as our educational system has collapsed into nonsense and irrelevance. Too bad.
“It would help enormously if our younger people had some historical sense of how we got here”
Yes, Television has been a sorcerer’s apprentice,. Reading is going away for the young. I began to read cowboy novels when I was about 8. I had a subscription to Argosy magazine which was an excellent short story source in the early 1940s. When I saw the movie “Shane” in 1952, when it came out, I immediately recognized it as a serial in Argosy titled “Rider from Nowhere.” It came out in the magazine in 1946. I was 8 that year.
Children don’t read for pleasure anymore. I worry about my grandchildren who have TV on all the time. Their father, my son, was not a reader as a child. I still remember that the assigned novel in 8th grade was “Great Expectations.” I bought two copies and told him I would read it with him so we could talk about it. It didn’t work and he is now 47. He reads now but did not then.
I read my cousin’s “World History” text book when I was about 10 or so. It read like a novel and began with the Doric Invasion and went through all the Punic Wars. I left it behind when I went to California for college. I have tried to find a copy in recent years but no luck.
I know a few parents with the stamina to turn off TV until the kids are older and it seems to work well. A friend in Tucson and his wife have magnificent boys. She took each boy to home school for a year each year. The rest of the time they went to Catholic school in Tucson. The oldest is now a Marine Corps officer with a degree in civil engineering. The other two are in college, one in petroleum engineering. The middle boy is big, handsome and plays classical piano. The youngest is now taller than his brothers.
The mother’s family owns a ranch in southern Arizona and the father and the boys would go out to the ranch to help the ranch foreman with spring roundup. They would ride horses all day. Great experience for boys.
I took my oldest sailing to Hawaii with me when he was 16 but he became a lawyer anyway.
Very Retired….”One of the biggest blind spots that the more naive followers of statist ideas have is the pervasive corruption that an expansive state not only allows, but actually encourages”
It strikes me that the typical middle-class person (who does not own his own business) doesn’t have to deal with the unpleasant aspects of the State all that often. There are income taxes, DMV visits, etc, but in general, he will deal with unpleasant corporate experiences (awful insurance procedures, poor customer service systems, etc) much more often….so he is likely to think more about the iniquities of Corporations more than about those of the State. And, of course, it will not be obvious how many of the Corporate iniquities (such as those involved in healthcare insurance) are actually reflections of State iniquities.
Medieval Latin is a doddle: I suspect it’s because the writers thought in English and therefore used English word order. I’ve never had a go at medieval German Latin: does one have to wait and wait for the verb at the end?
“the typical middle-class person (who does not own his own business) doesn’t have to deal with the unpleasant aspects of the State all that often. ”
It’s sad that doctors are no longer small business types. They are all on salary. Even the NHS physicians in England have their own practices and have to pay staff and so forth.
We will see a big swing in the politics of doctors now. I have talked to a few young primary care physicians recently and they all hate their jobs. I wonder how long it will be until that trickles back to medical school and pre-med?
DF— I agree to an extent, but have some caveats to your comment.
First, as the state becomes more pervasive and overbearing, it generates opposition amongst those who previously had had little contact with the officious beurocrat other than the DMV or dreaded IRS. Thus, the state manufactures opposition from those who would otherwise be indifferent to this or that inconvenience. The recent excesses of the EPA, or the bizarre story of the IRS blocking conservative groups, among many others, has generated a much higher level of dissatisfaction.
That reality leads to the second exception I must take to your reasonable point, I.e., that everyone greatly underestimated the depth and width of the anger and disgust that had built up among ordinary citizens. This occurred for two fundamental, interlocking reasons—one , the ordinary man or woman thought and felt many things were wrong, but complained to friends and relatives who were known to share at least some of the same ideas, but we’re often self-censored due to the relentless propaganda by the schools and media for collectivist ideology.
Secondly, the media simply ignores any non-statist ideas or possibilities when discussing current events, except to criticize them as uncaring or cruel or nonsensical, so many people never realized how common their discontents were among the general population.
The shock of the Tea Party’s emergence into a nation-wide phenomenon, and the utterly hysterical reaction by the elites and their media lackeys, was the first inkling that a great reservoir of discontent existed among the general population. The Trump candidacy has shocked so many people, including himself, I would bet, because it has provided a real focus for the widespread anger against the overbearing state, and the blatant double standards regarding all forms of rules and laws as they affect the elites in contrast to the average citizen.
People are creating a preference cascade far beyond their own imagining, and certainly beyond the comprehension of the media and the permanent governing coalition, which has only begun to expose the very real magnitude of the anger and dissatisfaction of the average citizen toward those who appear, much like the French nobility of the 18th century, to simply expect their dominance to continue forever, without regard to the success or failure of their policies.
The stunned reaction of the elites, as clueless about this situation as they are about most things in the real world, and responding every bit as incompetently as they have to most every other problem that has arisen in our society, is the ultimate proof that the anger is justified, and the solution is, indeed, to replace the elites in many areas of our society with a competent and non-corrupted leadership group.
Now that will be a very fine day, indeed.
Phil Ossiferz Stone
Don’t forget that it was Houston’s lesbian mayor that subpeonaed every church in town, to make sure their sermons wouldn’t speak against a new city ordnance letting gelded men in dresses into the ladies’ room. Don’t forget it was in Dallas where Debbie Davis supporters chanted HAIL SATAN and threw used tampons at pro-life protesters.
Everything is bigger in Texas. Which means that the moonbats in Texas are bigger moonbats than elsewhere. :) There seems to be a greater tendency in Texas for the libs to resort to lawfare. In addition to the recent PP indictment and Houston’s mayor trying to strong-arm the ministers, we have Ronny Earle. Ronnie Earle tried but was unable to convict Republicans Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Tom DeLay- both of whom were acquitted.
I believe you meant Wendy Davis, not Debbie Davis. Perhaps if there had been a snap gubernatorial election after Wendy Davis gained fame for her pink-sneakered abortion filibuster in the Leg, she might have made it a competitive election. But the more time there was to examine her record, the worse she looked. She fudged her life story, and got caught. Wendy’s attack ads boomeranged, and ended up hurting her. She lost by a landslide- 38%.
“anger and disgust among ordinary citizens”…yes, there is a great deal of this..but much of it is directed at “the billionaires” and especially at “Wall Street.”
I do think that the finance industry is too large and too influential…but this is also true of the legal industry, and there seems to be much less concern about this. And many of the attacks on finance, from those on the Right as well as those on the Left, simply border on the insane. There seems to be a “black magic” image to finance which a lot of people can’t get past.
When the state becomes involved in everything, and inevitably ends up distorting every possible economic situation into a political situation, then crony capitalism instead of a free market is the only possible outcome short of nationalization.
People are suspicious of big finance and big corporate because they can easily see that both are in bed with the pols, and the one getting hosed is the working schmuck who ends up paying for every body else’s incompetence and corruption.
The “conventional wisdom” is that the American people are stupid and endlessly gullible. That belief is profoundly wrong, as the utterly worthless elites, who think they can go on forever no matter how bad their policies turn out, are going to discover over the next several election cycles.
The people who defeated some of history’s most ferocious and deadly opponents, while building a 15 trillion dollar economy, are slow to arouse and anger, but very efficient at both creating value, and destroying, or casting aside, the valueless.
Enough time has passed, and enough nonsense has been allowed, that certain people have forgotten the lessons taught in blood in the last century. Apparently, the tree needs watering again.