Weekend Review: Patriots versus America

Washington Post: Primed to Fight the Government

Kevin Sullivan's story takes on the U.S. militia movement. For the most part, this is a fair view of the militia movement, until this paragraph:

Law enforcement officials call them dangerous, delusional and sometimes violent, and say that their numbers are growing amid a wave of anger at the government that has been gaining strength since 2008, a surge that coincided with the election of the first black U.S. president and a crippling economic recession.

Catch that? Wink wink nudge nudge, this is just a racist thing. They do manage to somewhat step it back with this later paragraph:

President Obama’s progressive policies and the tough economic times have inflamed anti-government anger, the same vein of rage into which Donald Trump has tapped during his Republican presidential campaign, said Potok and Mark Pitcavage, who works with the Anti-Defamation League and has monitored extremism for 20 years.

Ok, so there may be legitimate gripes here...no wait, they are still "extremists"!

Fortunately, the rest of the article is reasonably fair in their portrait of B.J. Soper, the "founder of the Central Oregon Constitutional Guard."

One part of the article is two videos: One has Soper explaining his view of the Constitution, and the other is a law professor seemingly countering Soper's view. However, the law professor basically responds with a modern legally nuanced view of the Constitution, whereas Soper's view is pretty much what is written. Score one for the militia guy.

By the end of this article, Soper strikes me as a guy with whom I would share a beer. Kevin Sullivan needs work to get that beer.

Washington Post: We must weed out ignorant Americans from the electorate

The Washington Post was on a roll this past weekend, when you add in this editorial from The Federalist's David Harsanyi. I love this opening:

Never have so many people with so little knowledge made so many consequential decisions for the rest of us. 

A person need only survey the inanity of the ongoing presidential race to comprehend that the most pressing problem facing the nation isn’t Big Business, Big Labor, Big Media or even Big Money in politics. 

It’s you, the American voter. And by weeding out millions of irresponsible voters who can’t be bothered to learn the rudimentary workings of the Constitution, or their preferred candidate’s proposals or even their history, we may be able to mitigate the recklessness of the electorate. 

No, we shouldn’t erect physical barriers to ballot access. Let’s purchase more voting machines, hire additional poll workers, streamline the registration process, mail out more ballots for seniors and produce more “Rock the Vote” ads imploring apathetic millennials to embrace their civic duty. 

At the same time, let’s also remember that checking a box for the candidate whose campaign ads you like best is one of the most overrated obligations of the self-governed. If you have no clue what the hell is going on, you also have a civic duty to avoid subjecting the rest of us to your ignorance.

I covered this issue last week, but Harsanyi comes up with another reasonable idea:

Now, if voting is a consecrated rite of democracy, as liberals often argue, surely society can have certain minimal expectations for those participating. And if citizenship itself is as hallowed as Republicans argue, then surely the prospective voter can be asked to know just as much as the prospective citizen. Let’s give voters a test. The citizenship civics test will do just fine.

This includes such brain-racking questions as:

“If both the President and the Vice President can no longer serve, who becomes President?” 

“There were 13 original states. Name three.” 

“What is one right or freedom from the First Amendment?” 

“What is freedom of religion?”

Harsanyi adds this truism:

And it literally takes seconds to learn about the fundamentals of our republic and the positions of candidates. If you forsake the power of information, you have no standing to tell the rest of us how to live our lives. Don’t vote.

Sadly, this is a great idea. That means it will never happen.

Politico: Sen. Tom Cotton: U.S. has 'under-incarceration problem'

Sen. Tom Cotton on Thursday slammed his colleagues' efforts to pass sweeping criminal justice reforms, saying the United States is actually suffering from an "under-incarceration problem."

Really?

(hat tip to Wikipedia for the chart)

 But let's give the moron the benefit of the doubt:

"Take a look at the facts. First, the claim that too many criminals are being jailed, that there is over-incarceration, ignores an unfortunate fact: for the vast majority of crimes, a perpetrator is never identified or arrested, let alone prosecuted, convicted, and jailed," Cotton said during a speech at The Hudson Institute, according to his prepared remarks. "Law enforcement is able to arrest or identify a likely perpetrator for only 19 percent of property crimes and 47 percent of violent crimes. If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem."

Maybe if the police weren't wasting so much time trying to enforce victimless crimes like drug use, they would have more time to go after murderers and rapists? Maybe if they weren't wasting time trying to make quotas of speeders and stop sign-runners, which are really nothing more than an extra tax on already over-burdened taxpayers, the police could catch real thieves (instead of helping the local government thieves)?

What we need to do is get rid of idiotic senators like Tom Cotton...

CNN: Trump campaign admits it did not raise $6 million for veterans

Long story short: Trump did a fundraiser for veterans' charities, and either didn't raise the $6 million he claims he did, or the charities haven't gotten their money.

Oh no! Trump lied! Is anyone surprised? I thought not...

Business Insider: Bernie Sanders' fiscal agenda keeps getting more and more expensive

On Thursday, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said [Bernie Sander's] agenda, including his single-payer health care plan, could add as much as $19 trillion to the debt over the next ten years. 

He wants to increase federal spending by over 50% a year, just so he can make an already irresponsible healthcare payment system even MORE irresponsible? This gets the bear...

Bing: The Bing Political Index

I noticed the search engine Bing now has a new feature, called the "Bing Political Index", where you can compare your own political views to presidential candidates. Great idea, except they include the Green Party candidate (Jill Stein), and all the Democrats and Republicans (including ones who have dropped out already), but no Libertarians. At least we know where Bing is biased...