Law takes a holiday

When the law goes on a vacation. Rules are unenforced or politicized. Citizens quickly lose faith in the legal system. Anarchy follows — ensuring that there can be neither prosperity nor security. The United States is descending into such an abyss, as politics now seem to govern whether existing laws are enforced.

Read these examples of how respect for the law is failing

Blog round up

For fans of Exodus, here's a terrific image of a burning bush

Can you be a libertarian and be pro-life?

This fellow changed from a believer to a climate change denier 

Probably this has been in the news, but Tom Brady's Super Bowl jersey has been found

Andy Warhol's previously banned painting of Mao Ze Dung is going on sale in Hong Kong.

 Glenn Reynolds tells us that a strict constitutionalist is better than a conservative activist

Scott Adams

Addresses the credibility problems of global warming science. What they need to do to convince him.

Video of the earth in different seasons

Here is a video of the earth over one year's time. As the earth rotates around the sun, the amount of daylight varies except at the equator. Watch this video from Astronomy Picture of the Day

Kellyanne Conway

If you are following the adventures of "Mrs Conway goes to Washington", you might enjoy this comprehensive article in New York Magazine.

As Trump’s highly visible and quotable campaign manager during the election’s final sprint, she became a constant presence on cable news and thus a subject of widespread fascination, armchair psychoanalysis, outrage, and exuberant ridicule. But rather than buckling, she absorbed all of it, coming out the other side so aware of how the world perceives her that she could probably write this article herself. Caricatures from that time, when hardly anyone believed Trump could defy the polls and win, depicted her wielding everything from a whip to a shock collar to tame her unruly candidate. But these days, serving as the senior counselor to the president, Conway is becoming less a supporting character than a bona fide celebrity in her own right. She is simply more famous — more beloved by Trump fans and more hated by Trump detractors — than anyone in any comparable role in any previous White House. 

Blog roundup

New York education officials are planning to scrap a literacy test for people trying to become teachers, claiming too many non-white individuals fail it and therefore weaken diversity within the profession. Don't teachers need to be literate in the English language?

Ben Carson has been in trouble lately for saying that slaves brought to the US were immigrants. It seems that Obama made that comparison eleven times.

President Donald Trump is "absolutely right" to claim he was wiretapped and monitored, a former NSA official claimed Monday, adding that the administration risks falling victim to further leaks if it continues to run afoul of the intelligence community. Everyone's conversations are being monitored and stored  More here on bugging by the Obama administration

UC Berkeley was on track to make education available to everyone for free, but the Obama administration killed the initiative by requiring handicap access.

Sweden is serving as an example of problems welcoming too many refugees from different (read Muslim) countries. Read what is happening to this society.

More on Middlebury College falling victim to liberal's opposition to free speech.   More on liberal bullying on campus

A new book from Amazon: Reasons To Vote For Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide. Be sure a look inside the pages and read the reviews.

During the Obama years: Every Single One of the lawyers hired into the Civil Rights Division were committed leftists. A Federal judge is blasting the unprofessional behavior of some

More on Jerry Brown's "Train to Nowhere" and it's funding and infrastructure difficulties.  More here on unrealistic ideas from California politicians

Elizabeth Warren is one of the most annoying politicians in government service. Apparently, she is not all that popular in her home state of Massachusetts either

A terrific story about a student's revenge for a bad grade

The story begins in 1982. A 19-year-old sophomore named Gregory Watson was taking a government class at UT Austin. For the class, he had to write a paper about a governmental process. So he went to the library and started poring over books about the U.S. Constitution — one of his favorite topics.

“I'll never forget this as long as I live,” Gregory says. “I pull out a book that has within it a chapter of amendments that Congress has sent to the state legislatures, but which not enough state legislatures approved in order to become part of the Constitution. And this one just jumped right out at me.”

That unratified amendment read as follows:

“No law varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives shall take effect until an election of representatives shall have intervened.”

Basically, it means any raise Congress votes to give itself can’t take effect until after the next election, allowing voters to decide how they felt about that.

The amendment had been proposed almost 200 years earlier, in 1789. It was written by James Madison and was intended to be one of the very first amendments, right along with the Bill of Rights.

But it didn’t get passed by enough states at the time. You see, to ratify an amendment, you need three-quarters of states to approve it. This amendment, though it was 200 years old, didn’t have a deadline.

Gregory was intrigued. He decided to write his paper about the amendment and argue that it was still alive and could be ratified. He got to work, being very meticulous about citations and fonts and everything. He turned it in to the teaching assistant for his class -- and got it back with a C.

Read the rest of this astounding story