Quote of the Day – Legal Edition

By way of preface, in 2004 I wrote the post “Game Over, Man. Game Over” which I concluded thus:

Mike Spenis said “the future of our freedom ultimately rests with the court’s willingness to periodically reexamine the law,” but the evidence is plain that the courts will not do that. They will use obviously flawed precedent so long as it “comports especially well with our notions of good social policy.” And even if it doesn’t, the courts will often bow, as Kozinski does here, to precedent they abhor. We depend upon the honor and intellectual honesty of the judges who make up the Justice system, yet it seems that those who are truly honest and honorable are outnumbered by those who are “willing to bury language that is incontrovertibly there.” The honest and honorable ones abide, under the rule of law, by precedent that is otherwise insupportable. The middling honest ones, the ones Justice Brandeis labled as “men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding” “build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases – or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text.” And those decisions stand, without review, periodic or otherwise, to serve as the next step down the road to Hell.

Tonight during a short discussion I had with Alan Gura he said something that boiled that paragraph down to a couple of sentences (from memory, so I may be paraphrasing):

Stare decisis is like gun control. It only affects those who respect the law.

9/11

So here we are, fourteen years after the attack, and there are finally (still mostly empty) structures where there used to be only the “National Embarrassing Vacant Lot and Monument to Red Tape & Inefficiency.”  Four years ago our embassy in Benghazi, Libya was attacked and four Americans lost their lives there under the watch of President Obama and Secretary of State (and Presidential hopeful) Hillary Clinton, who proceeded to lie to us about it.

I’m kinda concerned about what might happen on this day, both here in the States and across the globe.  The “JV team” of ISIS seems to have grown into the big leagues.  Pretty much the entire Middle East is in uproar if not chaos.  Hundreds of thousands of “refugees” – the majority, military-age males – are streaming away from the conflicts – plural – and into Europe.  That’ll not end well.

And our President has overseen the negotiation of a not-Treaty that will result, later if not sooner, with Iran building nuclear weapons.

And THAT will not end well.

And here?  Well, as Glenn Reynolds keeps repeating

My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing.

Fasten your seat belts.  The ride might get bumpy over the next few years.

Quote of the Day – “Right to Be Safe” Edition

Found on Facebook via the Cornered Cat:

Someone is going to read this and think, “I have a right to go anywhere I want. Just because something is dangerous doesn’t take away my rights.” Let’s get this over with now. Defending yourself is not and never has been about rights—rights are those things that the civilized members of society agree everyone “deserves”. When you hit the ground and taste blood in your mouth, when a steel-toed boot slams your head into a curb, when a knife slips under the waistband of your skirt and a hand is wrapped around your throat, the civilized agreement on how people should be treated is not an issue. – Rory Miller

But too few people grasp this fact.