Scott Bradford: Off on a Tangent

Are You Ready for Christmas?

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I kid you not; some retailers are already putting out Christmas decorations. K-Mart stores are starting to put out their displays and are already featuring Christmas on their website (see screen shot).

I understand that retailers are hurting because of the economic downturn, but this is just . . . stupid. I can’t think of anything more intelligent than that. It’s stupid. Really, really, really stupid.

It’s insulting too. Christmas is supposed to be a serious, religious holiday. Christmas isn’t about the economy, or business, or profit, or presents. It’s about Our Lord Jesus Christ. If you don’t buy into the religious importance of the holiday, that’s fine. You can ignore it without making an all-year mockery of it.

Moral Consistency on Liberty (at Daily Kos!)

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I read an article over on Daily Kos today that I really enjoyed: Why Liberals Should Love the Second Amendment by Kaili Joy Gray. Among all the positions generally held by folks on the ‘left,’ the anti-gun-rights stance is one of the most inexplicable. You would think that the civil liberty mavens, defenders of free speech and the ‘little guy,’ would be the first to defend the one right that secures and protects all others. Without the right to keep and bear arms, all the other rights are sitting ducks at the hands of an all-powerful government.

Gray’s piece is perfectly logical, well articulated, and correct. Go read it (especially if you consider yourself to be in the ‘left wing’)!

And yet, despite the recent Heller and McDonald decisions, liberals stumble at the idea of the Second Amendment as an individual right. They take the position that the Founders intended an entirely different meaning by the phrase “the right of the people” in the Second Amendment, even though they are so positively clear about what that phrase means in the First Amendment.

If we can agree that the First Amendment protects not only powerful organizations such as the New York Times or MSNBC, but also the individual commenter on the internet, the individual at the anti-war rally, the individual driving the car with the “F[***] Bush” bumper sticker, can we not also agree that the Second Amendment’s use of “the people” has the same meaning?

U.S. Government Apparently Shutters 73,000 Blogs (Updated)

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Update 7/20/2010: New reports are emerging, indicating that much of the original information about the shuttering of Blogetary.com (see below) was incorrect. According to these new reports, Blogetary.com was shuttered by its ISP because of terrorism-related material on its blog network.

The Burst.net hosting provider actually made the decision to shutter the blogs, not the federal government, making this an example of corporate overstep rather than federal overstep (though no less inappropriate). Burst.net and/or the FBI should have contacted the operator of Blogetary.com directly so that he could terminate the account(s) in question. Blogetary.com should only have been shut down in its entirety if/when its operators failed to take action.

I have left my original entry regarding this matter available below. Note that while, in this particular instance, the Obama administration bears little or no blame for what happened, there have been other recent examples of federal Internet overstep and the core thesis of my article remains valid despite the incorrect details of this case.

Read more . . .

Some More Random Photos

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Just a few random photos (including a few you might have already seen on my Facebook stream). We have a few of our cats, including two of Vincent being a freakin’ weirdo, and some strangely labeled food products that seem to be made of puffins, penguins, and silverfish.

Pelosi Has It Backwards

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It’s very interesting to see Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA 8th), Speaker of the House of Representatives, complaining that President Barack Obama (D) isn’t doing enough to help his party maintain its House majority in November. Given Obama’s dwindling poll numbers and the vehement, widespread opposition to his policies from both the ‘right’ and the ‘left,’ if I were the Speaker of the House I would be begging him to stay away.

After jumping right on-board with Bush’s incredibly unpopular bailout bonanza, failing to fulfill even the simplest of his campaign promises (e.g., holding all health care debates and discussion in public and broadcast on C-SPAN), pushing through a misguided health care reform plan, and other debacles . . . well, Obama is increasingly proving to be political poison. Almost every congressional or gubernatorial candidate Obama has campaigned for during his presidency has lost—Creigh Deeds in Virginia, Jon Corzine in New Jersey, and Martha Coakley in Massachusetts to name the most noteworthy.

Republicans are poised for a surprising comeback only two years after their well-deserved 2008 trouncing; if the Democrats really want to blunt the impact they need to distance themselves from Obama’s broken promises of a transparent, bipartisan, people’s administration. The ground-swell of moderates that put Obama in office are very angry and betrayed by the ‘politics as usual’ that continues in Washington today; I would advise Democratic candidates to try and steer clear of the wreckage.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.