Never more true

Birds of a feather flock together

    

        We now see Trump fleecing his followers using his stolen election lie.  He no longer is able to support his lifestyle by branding his now-discredited name.  Trump is only following a long line of TV evangelists who have been doing the same thing to the same people for a long time.  Here is one of those whom Trump is modeling. 

P.S.

   We all just knew this existed.  Fox News is on the case.

Weekend funnies

Vandals strike again

 

     The Columbia Association put up signs for bikers that the wooden bridges were slippery when wet. It only took vandals 2 days to spray paint the signs.  Jerks.

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Weekend funnies

Student arrested at Reservoir High School having brought a loaded gun to school

  

   It was only a matter of time until we had an incident like what happened yesterday at Reservoir High School with a student with a loaded gun.  While the specifics of the situation are still developing we need to recognize how many guns are too frequently carried in our community.   While Maryland has more laws regulating how guns can be carried than other states we shouldn't be surprised that a juvenile was able to obtain possession of a loaded unregistered gun.  This past weekend we saw 2 people killed in a murder/suicide in Kings Contrivance.  We have 120 guns for every 100 people in the United States.  We would be shocked if we knew how many Howard County residents owned legal semi-automatic weapons.  Unfortunately, the attribute our country is known for is the "land of an armed citizenry."

P.S.

Happy Holidays everyone----- just don't read the newspapers??

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Weekend funnies

When individual rights conflicts with social responsibility

   

      The pandemic in the United States has clearly shown how the conflict between respecting individual liberty and having a social conscience has meant that we pay a terrible cost in COVID deaths. We are a country with enormous health resources yet we are the country with the highest death count.  It is frustrating to many of us that we need to have mandates to force people to take a vaccine that can save their life and the lives of others in their community.  Our personal liberty should not supersede our social responsibility when we are talking about a virus that is easily transmitted from one person to another.

    This conflict also applies to a person's right to own a semi-automatic weapon that was designed as a weapon of war.  The danger to society of such weapons being used in mass killings should override an individual's right to possess a gun.  Why do we outlaw machine guns and grenades and not semi-automatic weapons?

    Individual liberties have to always be balanced with social risk.  Liberties should never be viewed as absolute.

We are living with the compromises of our Founding Fathers

     Listening to the presentations before the Supreme Court this week on Roe v. Wade I couldn't help but think about how decisions made 250 years ago played into what I was hearing.  The Founding Fathers' concerns about the ability of the common man to determine who would be elected president established the Electoral College as a guard against the misinformed general electorate.  This has led to the election in the past 20 years to the election of 2 presidents that lost the popular vote.  Trump's minority vote election allowed the appointment of 3 justices who reflect the view on abortion of 39 percent of the American people.  We will see how taking a right away that is supported by almost two-thirds of the American people plays out in the future.

    When we see a Senate the has senators from states that represent 12 percent of the US population (from mostly conservative states) able to stop the senators from states representing 88 percent of the US population from passing legislation you can see the advantage that conservatives have in the Senate.  We daily see Sen. Manchin from West Virginia that has 0.5 percent of the US population determining what type of legislation gets passed for the other 99.5 percent of the population.

     We daily see how far we are from majority rule that is the basis of any democracy.

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