I love that Riley is just sitting there eating her soup.

I also love that she has a deer head mounted on her wall.

Anyway I agree with Jim, it isn’t anybody’s business.

False.  It's very much our business when he wants to be our ruler.

Interesting.   You don’t like petroleum, but you enjoy using its products recreationally.   

He is only interested in himself.  If that helps the rest of us that is fine, but first it has to help Trump.

I am so damn tired of hearing that lame argument from never Trumpers.  Go ahead -- name one instance where he put himself ahead of his country.  You can't because there are none.  He may well be the only president since Washington who saw his net worth decrease while in office, so just stop it.

You idiot Trumpkins have no more clue than I.  No one knows what happens after a default.  No one.  However, the world revolves around the good faith and credit of the United States.  Take that away and I don't know what lies on the other side and neither do you.

They got a history department at that school of yours?  A library?  This isn't the first default and collapse.  We know exactly what's coming.  It's you liberals that are always surprised.

... it was the aftermath of a world wide pandemic that robbed me of my beloved airplane.

I'd wager it was a little deeper than that.

Firing squad.  No blindfold.

No.  It has to be painful and it has to be public, so as to dissuade others from taking a similar course.  Treason is a betrayal of not only your country, but of your countrymen.  It is worse than murder.  At the time the Declaration of Independence was adopted, the penalty for high treason was:

To be hanged by the head until unconscious.
Then cut down and revived.
Then disemboweled and beheaded.
Then cut into quarters.
Each quarter was to be boiled in oil.
The remnants were scattered abroad so that the last resting place of the offender would remain forever unnamed, unhonored, and unknown.

I'd settle for burning at the stake, but really, they should be skinned alive, then hung by the hands over a fire and the ashes put in a rocket and launched to the sun.

You misspelled 'decade.'


Or maybe you meant 'year.'

Well obviously.  I well remember Ronaldus Magnus’s speech where he said that it’s not a matter of left or right but rather up into liberty or down into tyranny.

But we are having a problem defining conservatism.  The go-to definition for me, if overly simplistic, is conservatives are for economic freedom but social/personal controls and liberals are the reverse.  By that definition you can indeed be too conservative if you try to exert excessive control over personal behavior such as making it illegal to smoke pot in your own home.

By “up into liberty” Reagan wasn’t talking about anarchy, but maximum freedoms under a Constitutional framework. That’s what you probably call the balanced center or “true conservatism”.  I call that “classical liberalism”.  But if you want to define “conservatism” as “preserving the traditional system” then that works and we are in agreement.

Yes, the up/down came from Reagan's speech. I didn't make up the balanced center either.  That came from The Making of America:  The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution, W. Cleon Skousen, 1985

From the book:

Historically, the Founders knew they were pioneering new territory.  In the past, ninety-nine percent of the human race had to live out their lives under Ruler's Law, with all power in the ruler.

They would not have understood our modern mismeasurement which puts communism at the extreme “left” and fascism at the extreme “right” – as though they were opposites.  In reality they are simply different names for similar forms of despotism – the police state.  They both belong together on the side of the spectrum representing despotic government.

They said at one extreme we have “too much government” and at the other “too little government.”  They despised tyranny but considered anarchy even worse.  They felt the greatest challenge to civilized man is discovering some method of structuring a government, under control of the people, which would eliminate both mobocracy and tyranny.

The founders were optimistic as well as realistic about human nature.  They realized that all human beings are a mixture of sunshine and shadow.  The sunshine consists of the perfectibility of human reason.  This makes government and civilization possible.  The darker side of human nature is the imperfectibility of human passion and man's faulty sense of judgment that makes government necessary.  As James Madison stated:  “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”

The Founders' goal was to revive the ancient principles which would allow the sunshine side of human nature to enjoy virtually unlimited freedom, while setting up appropriate safeguards to prevent the doleful shadow of human passion, greed, and lust for power from spreading a permanent “dark ages” across the face of the globe.

As Clinton Rossiter wrote, there is ”no happiness without liberty, no liberty without self-government, no self-government without constitutionalism, no constitutionalism without morality – and none of these great goods without stability and order.”

Jefferson and several of the other Founders had discovered that the most substantive principles of representative government were those practiced by ancient Israel under the leadership of Moses.  Jefferson had also studied the institutes of government of the Anglo-Saxons and had found they were almost identical to those of the Israelites.

 That basic pattern is where our form of government came from – people's rule or the balanced center.

I recommend reading The Making of America and The 5,000 year Leap, also by Skousen.
He also wrote The Naked Communist and The Naked Capitalist, which are also good reads.