Archives for June 2012

I used to let myself get far too angry about far too many things, especially online. (This is the way I frequently felt.) Even when I was right, the angry way I acted often made me wrong. Even worse from my point of view, the rage I felt toward others was eating at me inside. I was hurting myself.

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about why I got so angry and looking into family issues that contributed. (One of my most vivid childhood memories is of the many times my father would be yelling at me so angrily that I’d watch the veins of his neck swell as he yelled.) I had to retrain myself in a number of ways and change some of my ways of thinking — or at least learn how to manage what I was feeling instead of being destructive.

I still get angry with idiots — and sometimes with non-idiots who just rub me the wrong way — but I’m able to remind myself about my priorities and ask whether anger does any good. It’s very rare that I let myself get as angry and combative as I used to.

I’m happier with myself and I think other people are happier with me.

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Many of the people who read this site are pretty unhappy about Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling about ObamaCare, so let’s take a look a some cartoons poking fun of  the health care proposal that most of us love to hate. We’ll start with a look at the potential future for some of us who aren’t inclined to follow the new law.

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The U.S. Constitution is dead. We might disagree about when it died or what to do about it, but it’s time to admit that the piece of parchment that our civic religion taught us to revere is cold and dead.

The body of the Constitution is still trotted out from time to time. A few quaint parts — mostly a few among the Bill of Rights — that courts still want to pay attention to get some lip service. Other parts are blatantly ignored. Yet other parts are “reinterpreted” to mean whatever the people in power need them to mean. But the document itself as a whole — the meaning of the words as the writers and ratifiers understood them — is empty. It’s like some sick civic version of the bad old movie, “Weekend at Bernie’s.”

For many conservatives and libertarians, there is no more cherished political idea than that of “returning to the original meaning of the Constitution.” It’s time to be honest and blunt about this. It would make just as much sense to talk seriously about looking for dinosaurs today. They’re extinct. They’re not coming back. And neither is the actual meaning of the Constitution.

The fantasy of bringing back the Constitution in its actual meaning keeps being shot down, time after time, but people hopefully return to it like an abused wife returning to a husband who beats her. Those of us who believed a return to the Constitution could change everything keep being disappointed. The latest example was Thursday when the Supreme Court let the worst parts of ObamaCare stand.

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