20 July — Last thought of the night–at the core, I AGREE with the most basic tenet of the Republican platform. Yep, I do.

Our country was founded by many who believed strongly in individual rights, of local government being superior to a strong central government. Of fixing your own problems and building your own way and creating your own opportunities. I concur with these ideas.

The problem is that those individual rights, the opportunities they provide, need to be applicable equally to all. The system that has developed, to a large part led by those who have lost complete control of the Republican Party, has put roadblock after roadblock in the way of those opportunities. They have sought to restrict equality to select groups. When you actively restrict the freedoms of all but a select few, when you get in the way of their opportunities to build a better life, how can you champion what was created in the form of the USA? No one at the RNC has even come close to offering up making this country whole and equal again.

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20 July — Beyond the insanity of speakers the first two nights of the RNC, there is one thing that jumps out at me. The same thing has has struck me the entire campaign.

There have been zero speeches on policy. There has been no plan. Well, not entirely, as the D.C. Professionals like Paul Ryan are addressing issues–their issues, not Trump’s, and usually not even with mentioning Trump by name. The campaign itself has no plan.

And all that leaves is what they are against. You can’t be against everything and have no concrete plan. Build a wall? How? With what? By whom? When?

You can not ad lib this. You need a plan. Yes, unforeseen circumstances can arise and you need to be agile (something else the campaign is not so good at) but you at least need a plan. There is none here.

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19 July — The NRA’s HQ has the following word’s hanging in their lobby:

“.. the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Sound familiar? It should. It is about HALF the 2nd Amendment. Here it is in it’s entirety:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The meaning is a LOT different if you choose to read the entire Amendment, or hang it on your wall. Strait up, in the language of the day, this amendment is all about military service in your state militia. We have changed over 240 years. Some sort of gun rights are fine–but we can’t continue to pretend that the Founding Fathers meant anything other than what they meant. That the States had the right to maintain a militia independent of the Federal Government, and that EVERY SINGLE MAN WAS REQUIRED TO BEAR ARMS FOR THAT MILITIA.

If you decouple the militia and the service commitments, by default you decouple the entire Amendment, and you HAVE TO JUST GO BACK TO SQUARE F’N ONE. The 2nd Amendment no longer has any meaning in our country–time to scrap it and start over.

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16 July —

http://nationalinterest.org/…/how-congress-abuses-the-budge…

My last share of the night and a good deal of tomorrow. Read this, it’s important. Along with shrugging off their duties to oversee the military and war powers, Congress has also shirked off the proper way of funding military engagements. The OCO is a budgetary trick. If you want to wage war, you have two options — raising taxes to pay for it or cutting back on something else.

We instead set up a special account and borrow to fund it.

We MUST fix Congress.

How Congress Abuses the Budget to Fund U.S. Wars

Democrats may have stopped OCO from being used as an unlimited war fund.

NATIONALINTEREST.ORG

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20 July — in response to a friend’s 2nd Amendment post on Facebook:

“I like the idea of redefining it, but the only problem is who’s going to be left in charge to do that?”

Me:  Good question. Definitions change over time, word use changes over time. Entire legal ideas change over time. The Founding Fathers would no doubt be shitting their pants over our interpretations of more than just the 2nd. They knew this would happen, they allowed for it to happen. They WANTED it to happen. Some even argued for it the be a requirement, to have a Convention every so often as part of law. The meaning of the original 2nd, as written and explained by historians after exhaustive research over decades, is clear. Militia was the STATES (ie an actual state like New Jersey) right to maintain as a buffer against the possible overbearing FEDERAL ARMY. ALL men were required to SERVE in the militia, and they were also required to bring their own guns to weekend duty. To BEAR ARMS was used nearly exclusive in a military context in the 1780s and 1790s. The MINUTE that the militia became the National Guard, that the requirement to serve for all men lapsed, we should have chucked and rewritten the 2nd. Fast forward to the late 1970’s when the NRA morphed into the beast it is now, and the end was neigh. 2008’s ruling actually tied what types of guns should be legal to MARKET SHARE, not practical or military use. And I wasn’t joking when I mentioned SCOTUS’s ruling over 200 years allowing states to enact their own gun control laws, unless those laws messed with Federal military needs. I have no problem with legal and smart gun sales. I DO have a problem with anything even resembling a military weapon for sale to the public, other than handguns. You will never get them all off the streets, but we don’t have to sell any more of them. First thing to do? Hold a Constitutional Convention every 25 years to, at a minimum, look at how language has changed, at how our world and country have changed, and make changes to the Constitution as needed. “The right of a qualified citizen to purchase certain types of firearms for the purpose of self defense in the home and hunting/sport use shall not be infringed.” You want a military weapon? Join the military. This is not the Ten Commandments. This is not the Word Of God. The Founders would support us in this.