I can’t say I agree with everything Steve says about marriage, but I’ve got to admit that he makes a few good points.

Especially this one:

Sex is great. Well, so is Mexican food. But you don’t have to have Mexican food regularly to be happy. People talk as if sex is like oxygen, but that’s bullshit. It’s five percent of a contented life, even if you have a strong sex drive.

I’ve made a similar argument in the past, especially after I was told that encouraging abstinence was essentially telling people to ignore their needs. Sex is a desire, not a need. Period.

Shutting down the border between the United States and Mexico, some people claim, would cripple our economy, not to mention that it would unfairly punish people whose only real crime is that they want to work, often taking jobs that U.S. citizens won’t do. On the (extreme) other side of the debate, we’re told that the fairly porous border between the United States and Mexico is a security risk, not only because people with malicious intent could slip in alongside the well-meaning workers, but because a man who comes to the U.S. to work as a gardener is himself a threat, for some reason or another.

I don’t deny that illegal immigrant labor does fill some jobs that U.S. citizens won’t, but I think that problem might be alleviated somewhat if we stopped paying people for doing nothing more than staying at home and popping out kids at a rate that seems to imply that they think they’re rabbits encouraged people on welfare who can work to do so. On the other hand, the libertarian in me can’t help saying that it’s wrong to punish people who want to come here and work, especially since we’ve spent the better part of the last century actively trying to selectively breed the work ethic out of our populace.

I don’t understand why people don’t comprehend that there are more than two options here. There isn’t “illegal immigration” and “no immigration at all.” There’s also legal immigration. That’s why we say “illegal immigrants” instead of just “immigrants.” The word “illegal” there isn’t redundant. I have no idea what the process for coming to the U.S. and working legally is. Maybe it’s too hard to get into the United States to work legally, whether or not you actually plan on become a citizen. If so, then the answer is to lobby for reforms in that arena, not to simply say, “Screw it. Don’t enforce immigration laws period.”

I’ve been reading a few articles about the student protests in California about the immigration reform stuff, and honestly, I can’t figure out how the heck students get this stupid. I wish I could find the link now, but one article had a 14-year-old who’d lived in the United States his entire life, whose parents had immigrated here legally before he was born, whining about how cracking down on illegal immigrants would have stopped his parents from getting to the United States. If I’d been the reporter, I would’ve slapped him and then asked if getting tough on cocaine dealers meant people couldn’t buy Tylenol, too.

Honestly, if it were up to me, I’d crack down on illegal immigration, but I’d make legal immigration much easier (both for people who’d just like to work here and for people who want to live here permanently). I have exactly three criteria for people who come into the United States that I’d like to see enforced:

1. Don’t cause trouble. Simple enough. If you want to rob and murder and whatnot, stay home. We have enough trouble with the people already here, thanks.
2. Learn to speak the language. It’s not that hard. Really. I’m not asking that you become the most eloquent person ever, just that you learn enough to function in society without requiring every business and government agency to make “bilingual” a requirement for getting a job. Besides, 99.9% of the people who were born and raised here have only a tenuous grasp on the language. You should be able to do at least as well as them.
3. Respect your new home. Hey, I’m all for remembering your roots and loving the place you came from, but seriously, if you think that your homeland is so much greater than the place that you’re in now, why the heck are you here, anyway?

That’s it. I don’t think I’m being too demanding.

During a Fourth of July celebration a few years back, I borrowed my dad’s truck to make a quick trip from my grandfather’s house to ours to grab a fishing pole for one of my young cousins so he could fish in my grandfather’s pond. When I got near our house, I saw a pickup sitting in the middle of the road in front of the junkyard that’s across the road from our house, right beside the sign that said “Customer Parking” with a big arrow indicating that the customer parking was in the small, empty lot just off the road.

We’ve had a lot of trouble with the junkyard’s customers, who apparently don’t realize that the road doesn’t end where the junkyard starts, and who block our road on a weekly basis. With my windows down, I grumbled, loudly, as I squeezed past the truck by driving into the ditch. “I can’t stand people who’re too stupid to read ‘Customer Parking’ signs and follow arrows.”

An hour or so later, as I was fetching something out of my van, the pickup stopped in front of my grandfather’s house, and the man in the passenger seat leaned out the window and gestured at Dad’s truck. “That your truck?” I confessed that it wasn’t, but that I’d been driving it not long ago. “So, you’re the one who called my wife stupid?”

“I didn’t call her stupid. I said that I didn’t like stupid people who couldn’t read signs. Whether that applies to her or not isn’t my call.”

“You didn’t like where we parked? We’ve got the right to park wherever the **** we *******-well please!”

At that, I turned and walked away, though the voice in the back of my head wanted me to ask him which amendment guaranteed that right. I mean, I knew the one that allowed me to complain about stupid people, but the parking amendment wasn’t really one we’d covered in my history class.

A similar question ran through my head when I read the short article “Suing for Harmony” from the San Diego Union-Tribune:

John Claassen is suing the popular online matchmaker eHarmony for refusing to help him find a date. The company says there’s one good reason for that: He’s still married.

Claassen, a 36-year-old lawyer from Emeryville, filed a lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court, alleging eHarmony abridged his civil rights by refusing to match him up.

So, if any of my readers are better scholars of the Constitution than I am… eHarmony abridged which right by refusing to help him cheat on his wife?

I have to confess that I have a bit of a bias against California. I tend to view California as a totalitarian state where the government sticks its nose into people’s business far too often. That view may or may not be an accurate one; I mention it only so that you’ll understand my initial reaction to the story of a man who was charged more then $4,300 for four burgers.

My very first thought was, “Okay, the nanny-state ‘vice taxes’ have gotten out of hand in California.”

Obviously, the high powered rifle isn’t enough for hunting mosquitoes…

My high school gym teacher, Coach Davis, would get riled up about people whining over nothing and yelling about “making mountains out of molehills” and “hunting mosquitoes with high powered rifles”. [Note: The preceding quotes may not be exactly accurate. Anyone from my high school care to correct them?]

Peter David is extremely upset about George Bush signing a bill that hadn’t passed the House of Representatives:

Well, obviously Bush is learning. In his secret wiretapping program, he threw out the laws, procedures and guidelines in order to do whatever he wanted. And now he, along with his GOP cronies, are simply throwing out the procedures for MAKING laws that all of us learned back in eighth grade social studies. A budget cut of $2 billion that’s going to crucify the elderly and infirm simply bypassed the whole pesky House/Senate voting thing and was signed into law by Bush.

Bush wrote a law himself that crucifies the elderly and infirm! Well, that makes the Bush/Hitler comparisons a lot more apt, I think.

Except, of course, that’s not what happened. From the Washington Post’s article about the spending measure:

No one disputes the central facts of the lawsuit: Last December, Vice President Cheney broke a tie vote in the Senate to win passage of a bill that would cut nearly $40 billion over five years by reducing Medicaid rolls, raising work requirements for welfare, and trimming the student loan program, among other changes.

Among those other changes was a provision to restrict Medicare payments for durable medical equipment, such as wheelchairs and oxygen tanks. Under the Senate bill, government-funded leases for such equipment could last only 13 months.

As the measure was being sent to the House last month, a Senate clerk inadvertently changed that 13-month restriction to 36 months, a $2 billion alteration. With the mistaken change, the measure squeaked through the House, 216 to 214.

Once the mistake was revealed, Republican leaders were loath to fight the battle again by having another vote, so White House officials simply deemed the Senate version to be the law.

Yes, it was an immensely stupid thing for the White House to do, because there’s absolutely no way in Hell that the Supreme Court would uphold a law that passed in two different versions between the House and Senate (then again, the Supreme Court did ignore the Constitution when they heard Kelo vs. New London, so maybe I shouldn’t presume I know what they’d do). The White House had to have known that the bill’s opponents would (quite rightly) raise a stink over this, and it’s damaging to the President’s image as a man who’s trying to do the right thing, because there’s no way to justify this that doesn’t boil down to “we wanted to cut a few corners to speed things up.”

This is not, however, a case of George Bush acting like a dictator, fabricating and signing a law completely without the involvement of the House and Senate. It’s a matter of a mistake made by a Senate clerk (not to be paranoid, but part of me wonders whether the clerk made a mistake or if s/he deliberately rewrote the bill in hopes of delaying its passage through the House) and the White House not wanting to go through the proper channels to have the problem reviewed and fixed. It’s a matter of laziness, and nothing more diabolical than that.

Peter is right in his second paragraph, where he explains what Bush should have done (with the caveat that, as one of Peter’s commenters mentions, if the bill isn’t legal for beign signed into law, it’s not legal for Veto, either, but the basic gist of what Peter says stands):

If Bush were truly upholding the constitution as he vowed to, he would have kicked it back and said, “The buck stops here. If you guys can’t do YOUR job properly, I should at least do mine. Vote on it and send it through the proper way, and then I will sign it or veto it, as the Constitution dictates I am empowered to do.”

Bush didn’t do that, and it’s a black mark on him that he didn’t, but he didn’t break the law (at least, I imagine there’s no law against signing a bill that was passed in two different forms by the House and Senate). The bill he signed isn’t a law, because it didn’t pass through Congress, and that’s that.

I’m a huge fan of Peter’s fiction work, and I’ve often praised his blog for being a good site to visit because the discussions are usually entertaining if not informative, but of late, his political posts have seemed more and more like BDS rants. That’s annoying when he’s wrong, and even more so when he’s right, because he’s only damaging his own argument when he tries to turn a stupid, nonsensical move by the Bush administration into an impeachable offense, not to mention the hyperbole involved in equating a spending measure with crucifying old people.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of hyperbole as a rhetorical tool, but, overused, it just makes you seem a bit, well, batty.