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Democrats Stepping into the Abortion Bear Trap on Court Packing

Posted: October 14, 2020 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, elections, politics, primaries
Tags: , , ,

About a week ago I saw a piece at the NYT that argued that Democrats would be better off if Roe v Wade was repealed and sent back to the states on the grounds that it would take the issue off the table and allow religious people who might like Democrat social programs but for some reason draw a line in the sand over murdering kids, a reason to return to the party.

I found the argument interesting in the sense that the reason why I left the Democrat Party in the 90’s was I concluded that as a practicing Catholic I just plan wasn’t welcome anymore.

That issue, becoming the sacred cow for the party combined with the move of the Democrats to a secular party makes a tough generational fight against a party that welcomes those who choose to “be fruitful and multiply” but amazingly the Democrats are on the verge of repeating this mistake with a totally different set of voters on a totally different issue. Court Packing.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have already balked on giving their position on the issue (I helpfully outlined it for them earlier this week) and it seems they are not the only candidates ducking and weaving with the subject comes around.

Other Democrats, in safe seats in deep blue states have been less circumspect:

Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts recently urged Democrats to support court-packing if Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell moves to confirm President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.

“Mitch McConnell set the precedent,” Markey tweeted. “No Supreme Court vacancies filled in an election year. If he violates it, when Democrats control the Senate in the next Congress, we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.”

Congressman Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts issued a similar statement in support of court packing. “If [McConnell] holds a vote in 2020, we pack the court in 2021. It’s that simple,” he tweeted on September 19. Grassroots progressive groups like the Justice Democrats have also supported the idea.

Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday told NBC, “We should leave all options on the table, including the number of justices that are on the Supreme Court.” Her remarks have also been echoed by Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

Their public embrace of this position completely changes the game and cements the trap.

This means that in every house race and in every senate race this year the whole “packing the court” issue can be raised over and over again and Democrats will have the fun choice of bucking their angry Marxist base or keeping their mouth shut

I’m suggested that Trump can checkmate the Democrats by introducing a Constitutional Amendment to fix the Supreme Court at nine seats. While it will come in handy this time around it has The democrats rejection of such an amendment can cement the issue for those worried about the destruction of the court system for decades.

It will be abortion all over with a whole different set of voters.

If Conservatives are smart they will force the Democrats into this dilemma and if they play it right, they’ll have an issue that will make coin GOP majorities long after Donald Trump is out of office.

If Democrats are smart they’ll help that constitutional amendment I suggested pass congress and while feigning opposition guide it though ratification to take the issue off the table as soon as possible, because if they don’t this trap will close on the and hold their party tight.

Seattle, Portland and California voting themselves into the 3rd World

Posted: October 13, 2020 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, politics
Tags: ,

A while back Powerline linked to a piece in the Seattle Times concerning business’ moving out

until lately, I felt comfortable. Now the sidewalks are emptier and certain categories of crime are rising, challenging Seattle’s recent history as an unusually safe city.

I remember being able to sit at Westlake Park at 11 p.m., waiting for a bus under the enchanting metropolitan night. Never being accosted by an aggressive panhandler or screaming souls off their meds. I wouldn’t do it today.

The new crime problem affecting citizens and hurting small businesses doesn’t have complex sociological roots. It’s because of City Hall. In addition to lax prosecution, especially of a core of repeat offenders, the mayor and City Council are to blame.

Actually I blame the voters who choose to go down this path, like the good folks in Portland who now have a choice between a sitting mayor who has coddled rioters for months and a challenger who thinks he hasn’t coddled them enough.

Granted national politics are involved here and to some degree they let this go because they didn’t want to hand the president an issue in a election year, but who willingly let’s their city be destroyed and their business’ looted to give a slight advantage to a candidate who is already likely to win your state?

To a person like me the very idea of it is insane, but then again to a person like me the very idea that California and the people in it continue to voluntarily vote themselves into 3rd world status is as insane as the folks in Seattle and Portland willingly electing activist who have supported thugs or the people of NY state and city willingly electing people who have devastated their state.

There are always those who profit off of these decisions and I’m sure those people like basically being feudal rulers who can push around serfs. I would think that Californians would be upset by this but of course if you were educated in a public school in California you likely have no idea what that reference is.

Bottom line the deepest of blue states are committing suicide and I see only one person offering a solution:

As he said to the black community four years ago “What do you have to lose?”

Joe Biden’s IF/Then/Else Position on Increasing the Size of the Supreme Court.

Posted: October 12, 2020 by datechguy in Uncategorized

There has been a lot of speculation on the Position of Joe Biden on increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Quite a few Democrats have come out in favor of this but Joe Biden has not only refused to publicly state his position on it but he has gone so far as to state the voters don’t deserve an answer to that question.

Now the position of Democrats in general and Joe Biden in particular seems pretty clear to me, but it might not be so for others so as a former programmer let me express it in the form of an early form of computer codeing namely an If / Then / ELSE statement.

IF

Joe Biden is Elected President of the United States

THEN

Increasing the size of the SCOTUS is a needed reform that Democrats in General and Joe Biden in particular, support.

ELSE

Increasing the size of the court would be a usurpation of power that Democrats in General and Joe Biden in particular, oppose.

END IF

Or to put it another way the Democrats are in favor of “court packing” as long as they are the ones doing the packing.

A few weeks ago I suggested 2 or 3 Constitutional Amendments for the president to introduce and while I still think #1 & #3 are pretty good ideas if I was President Trump instead of my Amendment #2 listed I’d introduce a modified form of said amendment below:

DaTechGuy SCOTUS Amendment #2a

(1) The Supreme Court shall be limited to a maximum of 9 sitting justices

(2) This amendment shall be allotted twelve months from the date of passage for ratification by the states with a single extension of twelve months if requested by single any member of congress.

I’d make the Democrats who don’t want to say if they will pack the court vote on this amendment and I’d make every Democrat House and Senate Candidate be forced to have a position on this issue ASAP

If the GOP is smart that’s what they’d do.

An Unexpected Vatican “Yoo Hoo, Bible” (and Catechism) Update

Posted: October 11, 2020 by datechguy in catholic, Uncategorized
Tags: , ,

You might remember a few years ago (July 14th 2017 to be exact) I was rather shocked to find that the Bible had been pulled from the Vatican Site.

Here is the text if you can’t read the screen shot:

“The Holy Bible is available in almost every language on earth: the Episcopal Conferences take care of the continuous updating of the translations. In order to have access to the latest Bible version, kindly consult the website of your Episcopal Conference. ”

Seriously you’re the vatican and you TOOK THE &(#$(@(% BIBLE OFF YOUR WEB SITE! You actually think it’s more important to carry a 13-year-old document by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace available for visitors than the Bible?

What on earth is going on in Rome?

And about a week later I noted that the Vatican had restored the Bible to their web site but did not make it visible to people looking for the Scripture:

So the question on the floor is this:  What on earth is going on?  If you are still referring people to the local sites and not providing a link to the Bible, why put sacred scripture back up if you’re going to make it tough to find?

Two logical answers come to mind

A charitable suggestion would be that people realized that even though they wanted people to go to local sites for scripture, every single document on the Vatican site since it went up that had existing links to the former online scripture became dead once it was pulled.  Fixing all those links would be an expensive, time consuming and frankly herculean task. So given the choice between fixing those links or putting scripture back up without a direct link to it they choose the latter.  If I had been their tech advisor that’s certainly the advice I’d have given to fix the problem.

A much less charitable explanation would be that the Vatican didn’t like the blowback from pulling the Bible but didn’t want to link to it, so they put it back up without a direct link to allow a spokesman to say “Of COURSE sacred scripture is available at our site, we just prefer you to use our local sites translation.” or in other words: “Beware of the Leopard!”

Here is the screen shot from that date of the page in question

Well there has been a development.

Yesterday I was reading my daily scripture from the Vatican site I ended up clicking not on the back button to get to the reference page of the bible but on the keys of Peter which took me to the front page of the Vatican Web site which I haven’t visited in the three years since those posts.

I thought I’d poke around as I was curious if there had been any change to operation “hide the bible”. You will note that on the front page there is no link to the Bible so most people who might visit looking for it might use the search function

And of course if you did a search for the bible using the Vatican search engine it would to my complete and utter lack of shock, avail you naught.

However I remembered that the Bible had been kept under Archive under Francis rather than linked on the home page as it once was. So on the front page of the Vatican Site I clicked on Archive.

On the Archive page there was a link at the top that said “bible” which was a good sign but there were to other things that jumped out at me.

w of course I remembered that the Bible was on the Archive site if you were going to the Vatican site and didn’t know it was there you might have to do a search for it.

Before we click on the bible link I want to note the addition to the Catechism of the Catholic church link which based on wayback machine searches was added between July 17th and Aug 11th of 2018 meaning that from that date people going to the Vatican site wanting to find that official church positions on various subjects by checking the actual Catechism of the church were dissuaded from doing so at least if you are a person who speaks English because if you read Italian.

or Spanish

Or French, Portuguese , German or even Latin the Vatican Catechism has no such disclaimer. Why it’s almost as if there is a direct effort to keep English speaking folk in general and American in particular unsure of the actual teachings of the church if they wanted to find it online.

Not that they would have found the Catechism anyways as you can see from this result from the Vatican Search engine anyways, but we digress..

Well once we are on the page we can now click on the Bible link and lo and behold we have a different page than before!

While we still have the disclaimer that we had before asking you to look elsewhere we also have a direct link to the Bible online were a person can actually click on it and read it at the Vatican site.

Yeah you still won’t find it in the search engine and yeah you have to know to click on the “archive” link to get there but this still a vast improvement on the whole “Yoo Hoo Bible” game that the Vatican was playing before.

But I still miss the days when we these words from Christ…

Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one.

Matthew 5:37

…were unambiguously at least the public policy of the Holy See.

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