Voter ID and Gun ID

Why ask for a voter's ID?  Is asking for ID racist?  I have lived in Chicago for years.  The Democrats' motto here is "Vote early. Vote often."  The legend goes that Harold Washington was elected mayor by a lot of voters from Indiana. The jokes are that people want to be buried in Chicago so they can stay active in politics after death.  The only reason liberals have for fighting ID laws is because they benefit from fraud.   Anti voter ID suits have a hard time finding plaintiffs that don't have an ID.  As far as ID is concerned, I think you need ID for most of the things you do in life, like cashing a check.  Liberals want ID and background checks for gun buyers.  Is that racist? 

Thoughts of John Locke on Holocaust Day

Recent articles on Holocaust Day have drawn comments that religion is a big contributor to violence and even genocide.  I think the problem is not religion itself, but rather the claim that what any individual believes to be the word of God should be held superior to other views by secular authority and forced on those who disagree.  I got this opinion while reading books by John Locke, starting in philosophy class in college.  The professor didn't think he was much of a philosopher, but I thought he was great.  Locke argued that government derives its power and legitimacy from the consent of the governed.  His views were extremely influential in the formulation of the government the US has today.  Please take a look at the wikipedia entry for John Locke, and in particular his views on religious toleration.   He was a very religious man who argued that human judges could not dependably evaluate competing versions of the word of God.  According to Locke, “No private person has any right to encroach in any way on another person’s civil goods because he declares his allegiance to another church or religion. Anything that a man has as a matter of human rights or civil rights is to remain inviolably his.”  Locke’s argument for toleration lead to the First Amendment provisions for freedom of religion.

Original article on Holocaust Day:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/345043/lessons-holocaust-day-dennis-prager?pg=3

Wikipedia entry for John Locke

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke

Source of Locke Quotation

http://www.egs.edu/library/john-locke/quotes/

Control Guns or the Mentally Ill?

I was taught in high school debate class years ago that to win the debate you had to prove that the solution proposed actually would fix the problem.  Most liberals seem to have skipped that lesson.  At least the comments to Kathleen Parker’s article on gun control seemed to skip that step.  The common element in most of the recent mass shootings was mental illness.  The Columbine shooters were mentally ill according to the FBI.  The Aurora movie theater shooter's psychiatrist reported warned the police that he was homicidal.  The Virginia Tech shooter had a history of mental illness.  Tucson police knew the Gabby Giffords shooter Jared Loughner was delusional.  Newtown shooter Adam Lanza feared his mother was going to commit him.  At least a partial solution to the problem would be to make involuntary commitment easier.  However, easier involuntary commitment would really upset the ACLU, so we must avoid talking about that.  Conservatives have noticed that the gun control solutions liberals propose do not address the problem.  This makes them suspect that the real purpose of these laws is different from what liberals say it is.  I have noticed that whatever the problem under discussion, the liberal solution is more government power.  Liberals have the hammer of big government imposed solutions, so the whole world gets treated like a nail. 

Columbine:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2004/04/the_depressive_and_the_psychopath.html

Aurora:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/21/james-holmes-mental-health-colorado_n_1820450.html
Virginia Tech:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/seung-hui-chos-mental-health-records-released/story?id=8278195#.UWWK3TfcYYQ

Gabby Giffords:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57576492/jared-lee-loughner-grew-delusional-in-months-before-tucson-rampage-police-reports-show/

Newtown:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/19/adam-lanza-motive_n_2329508.html

Original Article

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kathleen-parker-an-impotent-gun-control-solution/2013/04/09/cb6a6770-a153-11e2-9c03-6952ff305f35_story.html?hpid=z3

Obamacare Delay

The first link below is an article by a conservative who wants Republicans to help Democrats delay the implementation of Obamacare.  This is ridiculous.  To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, Republicans should demonstrate the theory that the Democrats knew what they wanted, and deserve to get it good and hard.  They got themselves into this mess without any Republican votes and they should have to get themselves out of it the same way.  In the second link, the New York Times admits the administration has already delayed cafeteria benefit plans for small business because they are “unable to meet tight deadlines in the new healthcare law.”  This delay is a black eye for Democrats.  I want to see even more delay announcements.  I hope to see the Chosen One on national TV explaining why he wants a 1 year delay for implementation as a whole because he can't deliver as promised.  Even more I want to see a Republican Congress in 2015.  It's the only way to stop the tax and spend insanity.  After that, I want to make sure we don't see Hillary Clinton inaugurated President in 2016. The only way to repeal this mess is to win both elections.  Giving GOP help to allow the government more time to lessen the pain and chaos of Obamacare implementation will only make both 2014 and 2016 elections harder for us to win.  We should not help the Democrats out of this jam.  It would be contrary to the long term interests of the country as a whole.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/343846/obamacare-reboot-christopher-j-conover?pg=2

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/us/politics/option-for-small-business-health-plan-delayed.html?_r=0