Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

Do I not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in my car or on my person? If I send my clothes out for dry cleaning, can the government put tracking devices in the hem of my pants? If I’m parked in a public parking lot can they put one on my car? I would have thought that I would have privacy in, on, or around any of my private property (land, house, car, boat, etc). Wow… just, wow.

People should be ashamed of themselves.

Can we be a LITTLE original, people?

Vitter, who is running for re-election, made the comments at a town hall-style event in Metairie, La., on Sunday when a constituent asked what he would do about what the questioner said was Obama’s “refusal to produce a valid birth certificate.”

Such claims about Obama’s birth certificate have been discredited. But with the crowd applauding the question, Vitter responded that although he doesn’t personally have legal standing to bring litigation, he supports “conservative legal organizations and others who would bring that to court,” according to a video of the event.

“I think that is the valid and most possibly effective grounds to do it,” Vitter said, although he later cautioned that the matter could distract from policy issues.

Seriously? Has this come back up, again? Didn’t we go through this all two years ago when he got elected? And didn’t we all settle down and learn that Hawaii DOES have a birth certificate from him? OMG, people, get over it, you lost, he’s president. Now, instead of clogging up the court system and our congresspeople with things that DON’T MATTER, why don’t we start trying to work together to make America great again? Maybe that would be a good idea…

The company has paid hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to settle suits alleging it locked workers inside stores, forced them to work through breaks and worse.

Yet those payouts could pale next to a class action suit claiming the company discriminated against women on pay and promotions. The company has said it does not think the claims made “are representative of the experiences” of its female workers. But lawyers say damages could run into the billions of dollars. Given the company’s track record, who would even bat an eye?

Maybe we could still have rollbacks if they paid people fairly rather than paying class action lawsuits? Just a thought.

I have never understood why people feel the need to carry a gun. If you’re a law abiding citizen you should have no need for one. I understand that some people want to feel safe and carry one for “protection”, but I can’t fathom actually killing someone with one, and it pains me to think that other people have such little value placed on human life that they see no problem with shooting someone. I’m obviously not talking about hunting rifles or going deer hunting or anything like that, I’m talking about kevlar piercing bullets in a .9 millimeter or an assault rifle or weapon that has been modified to act as an automatic weapon. These things aren’t necessary in domestic life. War? Yes. My home? No. And I don’t fail to note that the people who are fighting for guns to be easier to obtain and carry are white male Americans in the middle class. But these, generally, aren’t the victims of gun violence. The law the courts struck down was in Chicago, where the inner city is riddled with gun violence. The law was enacted as an effort to reduce the number of black youths being shot for no apparent reason. It followed an incident where a girl was shot as she lay on her bed, in her home.

I understand the one side of the coin where people argue that gun control laws infringe on individual rights, but on the flip side, generally speaking, the gun control laws are enacted to protect the lives of innocent people. And then there’s the side that pro-gun owners take that the guns being used in violent acts are usually obtained illegally, and I can get behind that, too. But how do we stop the flow of illegal weapons without controlling them? There has to be a sense of personal responsibility somewhere, but unfortunately most people are easily swayed through financial incentive. In a sense I think gun control needs to start at the manufacturer and seller. These are the folks with big pockets and they’re the ones creating modification kits and selling the weaponry. And by seller, I include pawn shops and gun shows and everywhere else that you can purchase a gun. I don’t know how to stop them from selling illegally, but I know that making it financially adverse for them to do so is a good place to start.

This article from the AP states that:

More than 80 percent of people who die in the United States have a long, progressive illness such as cancer, heart failure or Alzheimer’s disease.

More than 80 percent of such patients say they want to avoid hospitalization and intensive care when they are dying, according to the Dartmouth Atlas Project, which tracks health care trends.

If I recall correctly, and I think I do, the initial version of the health care bill included a provision for counseling people with progressive, terminal illnesses, should they choose to discontinue treatments and live out their days in peace, at home, under the care of Hospice. But, thank you, Sarah Palin, people are being overmedicated, operated on too frequently, hooked up to tubes and machines in hospital beds, suffering through their last days of life because doctors promise them a few more days/weeks/months. But someone has to ask, will I enjoy those days/weeks/months or will I be confined to a hospital bed, set apart from my friends and family? Someone has to help terminal patients make a difficult decision, and even tell their loved ones of the decision they’ve made. And that’s to speak ONLY of the patient’s comfort and level of happiness, what happens when you factor in the cost of all these treatments? Of course, if the person still wants to fight and still believes that there’s hope, it’s a whole other story, but all too often we fight for people long after they’ve passed the point of wanting to fight — they keep living to keep us happy. So who is the advocate for the ill?

So again, I say, thank you Sarah Palin for creating a stupid “buzz word” about something that could mean so much to so many. Thank YOU!

This little girl is three years old. How is it possible to hate someone so young and impressionable, and someone who has no real opinions about people yet? I don’t understand this world, and I never will.

Tuesday night’s speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor.

Are you f-ing kidding me? A speech presumably made to people old enough to vote (and therefore old enough to have either graduated from high school or be graduating soon) was too high-brow because it was at a near tenth grade level? Really?

So this is what it’s come to, America — we have to communicate to each other at a 4th grade level or we get looked down upon by our fellow Americans. So, come on, y’all, let’s dumb it down. National Dumb-it-Down Day — Let’s make it June 15 every year!!! WOOT!

I consider myself a classic conservative who adheres to the principles our founding fathers incorporated into the constitution, principles from which modern politicians in both parties have strayed egregiously. As such, I have trouble understanding why so many conservatives are quick to betray the principle of individual rights. Roe v. Wade is a classic case of the rights of individuals versus the power of the state to tell you what you can or can’t do. The true conservative position is to support the right of women to make that critical choice regarding something that will have an enormous impact on their life (to say nothing of the quality of life of their child, if they follow through and give birth). Sure, they should have thought about that before getting pregnant, and most women surely do, but there are many reasons that the best laid plans go awry: failed contraception, inordinate pressure from males up to and including rape, even bad choices rooted in emotional distress and inability to always make the right decisions — what humans don’t have their share of foibles? Very few women of any political stripe think having an abortion is preferable to not getting pregnant in the first place, so a lot of effort should be put into minimizing their occurrence. But when the unfortunate situation of an unwanted pregnancy does arise, for whatever reason, surely we don’t need the government telling us what we can or can’t do.

Of course, I understand that many of us hold strong religious beliefs that are the basis for how we view this issue. But even here, a true conservative is not going to give up their individual rights to have the church dictate to us any matter of personal conscience. The very founding of this country was predicated on strictly limiting the power of the church, as well as government, to control what we can or can’t do as individuals. Even the argument that abortion equals murder is fundamentally a religious point of view, not a scientific one, since in actuality there is no beginning point to life, but all life is continuous from the individual through the gamete to the zygote and onward to the next individual; who’s to determine objectively that there is some kind of magic difference between viable egg and sperm cells and the subsequent fetus of a couple of cells? The definition of a new individual at birth seems more logical to me, personally. Everyone may have valid different points of view on this issue too, but let’s at least get both the church and government out of the business of unduly restricting our beliefs and our choices.

A comment on: Top 10 Supreme Court Decisions That Should Be Reversed

Very, very well stated. Just fantastic.