As I mentioned in a previous post, I am one of those that believe in the Constitution.

More importantly, I believe that those we elect to govern this great nation should view the Constitution as, as Seth once put it here at Hard Astarboard, their employee handbook.

Then along came a whole bunch of politicians over the last few decades who saw fit to reinterpret that august document to meet their very unconstitutional political agendas, the Obama Administration and the Pelosi/Reid Democrats by far the worst offenders.

They saddled us, among other things, with the dreaded Healthcare Bill.

This bill is like a festering rash that is increasingly difficult to eradicate, as the new Republican majority in the House is discovering, so now the states have had to take matters into their own hands. Given that the Healthcare Bill has absolutely no respect for states’ rights (which are of major import in the Constitution), they seem to have an uphill battle to negotiate.

With efforts to repeal the health care law stalling on Capitol Hill, Republican lawmakers in states across the country are turning to another tool in the Constitution to try to limit the law’s reach — interstate compacts.

To backers, it’s almost like discovering a secret weapon hidden within the Constitution. Compacts, which are roughly like treaties between states, have the force of federal law, and a coalition of lawmakers and conservative activists and academics say they could just as easily be used to pry back from the federal government some areas of responsibility, including health care.

…it’s almost like discovering a secret weapon hidden within the Constitution…

This is tantamount to freedom loving Americans having to use portions of the Constitution to try and stave off forces of totally anti-America socialism coming from their own government, the same people who are supposed to be following the Constitution to begin with.

This strikes me as very wrong.

Shame on Obama and shame on every last one of those Democrats in Congress who have the audacity to describe themselves as Americans!

The whole article is here.

On another and lesser note, when Seth finally gets his already too-long problem out of the way and returns to join us in normal living, I somehow doubt that he’ll want to stay in New York, at least within the five boroughs.

Thanks to efforts by the little brat my husband calls “the pint sized Napoleonic maggot” (Michael Bloomberg), as of May 23rd, it will be illegal to smoke in public parks or concourses or on beaches within the jurisdiction of New York City.

This is the same mayor who elected himself transfat police, and whose administration couldn’t handle a simple snow emergency that went down on his watch. Yes, that one, the one who bribed the corrupt city council to allow him to run for a third term, whom Seth once said is doing his level best to tear the heart and soul out of New York before he leaves office.

While neither Wolf nor I smoke, Seth does (semi-copiously at times). For the last two and a half years, it’s been his only vice, believe it or not, as he actually quit consuming alcoholic beverages back then.

However, figuring what cigarettes cost in southern and some other states ($4.50 - $6.50) vs what they cost in New York City ($13.00 and change, I understand), it’s pretty obvious that the city and state collect at least $7.00 a pack in taxes. Now, there is no way you can tell me that between Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island anything less than a million packs a day are sold. So, that’s seven million times seven, or forty nine million a week?

Yet the same corrupt New York politicians who enjoy having all that tax money to waste and allocate to enterprises profiting their equally corrupt friends in the private sector are more than happy to oppress the same people who pay those taxes by making it more and more difficult to use the merchandise they pay all those taxes on.

You’ll notice that while they officially attack the rights of cigarette smokers, they won’t make tobacco products illegal and therefore lose all that tax revenue…

Anyway, that’s why I have the feeling that whenever he gets back to New York, Seth’s stay here will be relatively short.

I just read this week’s Ann Coulter column, Look For the Union Fable and thought I’d post it in case anyone coming to visit Hard Astarboard hasn’t seen it yet.

A sampling:

The need for a union comes down to this question: Do you have a boss who wants you to work harder for less money? In the private sector, the answer is yes. In the public sector, the answer is a big, fat NO.

(snip)

It used to be widely understood that collective bargaining has no place in government employment. In 1937, the American president beloved by liberals, FDR, warned that collective bargaining “cannot be transplanted into the public service.” George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO for a quarter century, said unions were not appropriate for civil servants. As recently as 1978, the vast majority of states prohibited unionization of government employees.

(Snip2)

But government workers think the job of everyone else in the economy is to protect their high salaries, crazy work rules and obscene pensions. They self-righteously lecture us about public service, the children, a “living wage” — all in the service of squeezing more money from the taxpayer to fund their breathtakingly selfish job arrangements.

Read the entire column.

I spent the first third of my life in Cuba, and unlike the liberals and the Democrats they control, I know exactly what it’s like to live under the thumb of a communist dictatorship. Yes, people, communism, despite all the “power to the people” bullshit these misguided American (progressive?) “useful idiots” equate with socialist/communist/”people’s” governments, that’s exactly what the government of Fidel Castro is: a dictatorship, and an oppressive one it is.

I was thrilled to come to a country where Democracy is the order of the day, where the government really belongs to the people. Where the will of the people is reflected in the candidates they choose to represent them, and each citizen’s vote counts to that end.

I have never missed voting since I became a U.S. citizen, an American.

Having said that, I have experienced quite a bit of disappointment over the last few years, what with those we have elected to lead us ignoring the will of we, the people as they pursue agendas geared more toward the playing of pure politics than the governing of our country according to the will of those of us who put them where they are.

Like my husband and our dear friend Seth, a few years ago I stopped considering myself a Republican, as the GOP had pretty much become like the Democrats in too many ways, thinking they knew more about what’s good for we, the people than we do and acting accordingly.

We merely consider ourselves Conservatives, and yearn for the government to return to their previous adherence to the Constitution, the great document that served this nation so well before they began treating it like it was yesterday’s news.

With the Tea Party movement came a restoration, in large part, to the Constitutional observance that was responsible for America’s success to begin with, and since those true Americans went to work awakening the public and supporting politicians with conservative values, the Democrats, who had only just hit the country with a blitzkrieg of far left legislation have been voted out of their congressional majority and the majorities in a number of states. I was looking at a poll based map the other day that showed that numerous blue states had become more evenly mixed between Democrats and Republicans.

So, to the topic of this post:

After the Democrats won their fleeting majority in the House, then speaker Nancy Pelosi famously told the Republicans that “we don’t have to listen to you anymore!”

Now they do, not only on the federal level but state level as well.

Cut to Wisconsin, and Governor Scott Walker and the state Republicans’ push to take away the economically stifling collective bargaining power of public employees’ unions. The state simply can’t afford to mollycoddle the unions anymore, and the Republicans in the majority now want to pass a bill to remedy the union problem.

However, the unions are the biggest contributors to Democratic campaigns.

The result? The Democrats left the state, ran out on their responsibilities to the people, the voters, their constituents, in order to deny their state senate the quorum they need to pass the necessary bill.

They ran out on the people!

Yes, that’s democracy demeaned, that elected officials should do such a thing.

And now, the Democrats in Indiana have done the same thing, because of a bill that, among other things, would prohibit employees from being required to pay union dues or representation fees as a condition of employment ran out on the people they took an oath to represent because, being bought and paid for by the unions, well, we can definitely see where their priorities are; Certainly not with the people.

Democracy demeaned by Democrats in two states so far, Democrats deserting the people as they flee their states with their tails between their legs.

Democrats who apparently don’t respect the American political system unless it maintains a majority of their own party members, which is the same as saying that they don’t respect the voters whose collective decision placed the Republicans in charge.

When confronted with Democratic majority extremes the Republicans, as I recall, didn’t run away.

They didn’t demean democracy.

Mrs. Wolf here.

Chuck has joined up with my husband and Seth in what is hopefully to be the final chapter of a difficulty Seth got himself into (not by fault, but due to his loyalty to a man who was employed by him, but I suppose that was all explained previously, or will be, when it’s all over, by one of the unholy trinity who usually post hereabouts) almost two years ago.

In the meantime, I have inherited the duty of attempting to keep things afloat, as Wolf would say. Chuck disappeared about a month and a half ago and left it all to me, but I’ve been so busy that this is actually my first opportunity to stick my two cents into the scheme of things.

What I want to post today is an article from todays New York Post that, knowing Seth as I have for over thirty years, would be right up his alley. He does, after all, tend to get his hackles up when he perceives that the government (the folks who are supposed to protect and defend us against all enemies, foreign and domestic) exhibits a complete lack of security competence in one matter or another, thereby failing, or potentially failing, in its protective duties.

Here we have a case in point

It’s enough to drive someone mad.

In a stunning security lapse, the federal General Services Administration mistakenly shipped nearly three dozen license plates marked “U.S. Government — For Official Use Only” to a humble Queens accountant, The Post has learned.
The foul-up is part of a troubling pattern of lost license plates at the agency, which handles plates for every federal office except the military.

“I don’t know how it happened. Mistakes can happen, but I guess in this day and age, you want to be careful,” said Antonio Guadagnino, who received the package, addressed to him, via UPS at his small Astoria office.

“If they ended up in the wrong hands, they could be used to get into secure places. Not everyone is so honest,” added Guadagnino, who said that he never held a federal contract and that his business consists mostly of personal income-tax returns.
Unsure of what to do with the plates, he handed them over to state Sen. Michael Gianaris, whose district office is in the same building.

But, Gianaris said, the GSA didn’t appear overly concerned.

“The reaction we got was that this was business as usual,” he said.
“This is not a time in our nation’s history to be screwing around with federal identification. What would happen if they wound up in someone else’s hands, someone who thought he could profit selling them — or worse?”

The GSA didn’t even bother to make arrangements to claim the plates until The Post made inquiries Friday. Only then did it rush over to take them.

Of course “it” did.

While Seth would kind of steam over stupidity like this (just imagine some disciple of Osama bin Laden behind the wheel of a vehicle sporting a set of these “official business” government plates driving through the gates of a nuclear power plant or some other volatile compound with a trunk full of explosives), my husband, having been turned profoundly sardonic by over 30 years of what he terms in-depth military and related “behind the scenes” government experience, would just laugh uproariously as he always does at unadulterated idiocy-slash-negligence, that or just shake his head in utter disgust, then pour himself a glass of Jack Daniels.

Now, just imagine how much more of this kind of thing goes on that we don’t hear or read about.