I still say 6-3

 There were people in comments to my 6-3 article that wanted to point out that Roberts is a wishy-washy conservative and will cave to the Democrat side. He can’t. Let me explain why:

Whatever the opinion is, the senior member of the court that is a part of that opinion is the one who decides who gets to write that opinion. So if Roberts wants to side with the 3 judge minority, then Thomas gets to assign the writing of the majority opinion to whichever justice he pleases. 

The only way that Roberts gets to do any damage control whatsoever is by limiting the scope of the opinion. Otherwise, the majority opinion will contain the strongest progun opinion that will still maintain the opinion of the majority. So he HAS to vote with the progun majority, or there is a risk that 922(o) will be struck down. 

What’s out there

 My wife’s favorite season is Autumn. Living in Florida, where the days are still topping out at over 90 degrees, we really aren’t getting to see that particular season. My wife wanted to go see the Fall colors, and wanting to keep her happy, I obliged. There were a few reasons for that, but the main one was her complaint that the prepping thing was getting to be too much, and she doesn’t want to live her life in a bunker. OK, I get that, so off we went- headed north.

I only had a couple of conditions:

1 We had to avoid any city that was higher than a Level One on my ‘Danger Zone” page.

2 We could only travel in states where my CWP was accepted. Since the Florida permit has reciprocity for most of the US, this shouldn’t be a problem. 

So, on Friday, we headed up I-75 into Georgia. We needed to avoid Atlanta (Zone 2), so we left the Interstate when we got to Macon, GA and headed northeast. My wife wanted to stop at Stone Mountain. I vetoed that. We wound up stopping for the night once we got to Athens, GA. We then travelled on to Helen, Ga. 

For those who do not know about Helen, it is a touristy small town with an Alpine theme. It was pretty crowded, and it is a perfect example of why Joe Biden’s national mask mandate won’t work. The town usually celebrates Octoberfest, but the event was cancelled. The town’s businesses and visitors don’t care that it was cancelled- this is what the beer tent looked like in the middle of the afternoon:

We left Helen and drove to Cherokee, NC. We spent the night there in a hotel, and got to play a bit in the casino. The casino, being a part of Caesar’s chain of casinos, has a mask requirement and temperature scan requirement for entry.  Still, the staff’s attempts at social distancing were unsuccessful. 

That is NOT six feet of separation. 
The western edge of the Blue Ridge parkway is in Cherokee, and we drove that for three and a half hours to Asheville, NC. The highest altitude was just over 6,000 feet. The colors were amazing, temperatures were in the 50’s, and the views were spectacular. In Asheville, we caught I-26 to I-95, and spent the night in Savannah, Ga before coming home. So, all in all, a pretty good three day roadtrip.
There are crowds of people out there who want things back to normal. Lift the government boot off the necks of the US economy, and it will take off again. I just don’t see that people WANT to be held back any longer. 
Speaking of support, I noticed that there were a very few Biden/Harris signs on the route, including lawn signs. There were at least ten times as many Trump signs. I will admit that we avoided the large cities, where I would presume that Biden has more supporters. However, there were not nearly as many Biden bumper stickers as there were Trump, either. 
I just don’t get the feeling that there is a groundswell of Biden support out there. I would be surprised of Biden has the votes that polling seems to indicate that he has. 

Stop wasting our time and money

 There is a news article blasting California school officials for threatening parents with the arrest of their child for truancy. Many on the right have a problem with this, and I am not sure I have a problem with enforcing truancy. I think that it should, however, be the parents who face penalties.

Truancy isn’t a new problem that has just come about die to COVID. For years, I have sat and watched as more than 75% of my students are chronically absent. Chronically absent means that a student is not in school more than ten percent of the time. More than a third of my students miss more than half of class time. One in ten of my students miss three quarters or more of school hours. Out of 180 school days, the median number of absent days is 23. If an adult were to miss that much work, they wouldn’t have a job for very long, yet half of my students are gone for the equivalent of a month each school year. 

I have had students whose parents sign them out of school every day, two hours before the end of the school day, so the student can go to an after school job. Some students are late by an hour more to school every morning, and when you ask them why, they will tell you because they wanted to stop to get breakfast with their boyfriend/girlfriend. 

Teachers are held responsible for what their students learn or do not learn. If a teacher’s students are not learning enough, that teacher can lose their job. If enough students fail to learn, the entire administrative staff MUST be terminated by law. 

Taxpayers should be livid, because the courts have ruled that a free education is a constitutional right. That means the school must be funded with taxpayer dollars, even if the students choose not to go. These truants and their parents are robbing the taxpayers blind. 

I think it should look like this:

For students under the age of 15: 

If a student misses more than 5 school days in a quarter, then the parents will be subject to a monetary fine of up to $250, unless they can produce a doctor’s note outlining an illness that prevents the child from coming to school. 

If a student misses more than 10 school days in a semester, then that fine increases to a maximum of $1,000. 

If a student misses more than 30 days in an entire school year, then the parent can be sentenced to up to 30 days in jail and additional fines. 

For students over the age of 15: 

If a student is tardy to school more than 5 times in a semester, then the student loses campus parking privileges.

If a student skips or otherwise misses 15 hours of any single class in a single school year, they will automatically fail the course and their parents would be subject to a fine of not more than $500. 

If a student misses more than 5 school days in a quarter, then the parents will be subject to a monetary fine of up to $250, unless they can produce a doctor’s note outlining an illness that prevents the child from coming to school. 

If a student misses more than 10 days in a school semester, they will be subject to a hearing that will determine whether or not they are defacto dropouts. If they are ruled to be dropouts, the student will be removed from taxpayer funded school and will not be able to re-enroll in school at taxpayer expense. Wanna skip school and waste money? Do it on your own dime.

Democrats coming unglued

 They are furious that the Republican Senate is about to confirm ACB. They are claiming that the refusal to fill Scalia’s seat is ‘court packing’ and somehow wrong. 

The Democrats could have selected Scalia’s replacement in 2016, and the accusation is that the Republicans wouldn’t allow his selectee to be voted upon. That is pure BS. The Obama administration could have had Scalia’s replacement in 2016. All they had to do was offer a replacement that was not a hard core leftist. If they had offered a more centrist candidate, the Republicans would have likely approved. The reason is that the Republican Senate would have approved a left leaning centrist, rather than wait to see the hard core leftist that HRC was going to nominate. 

But Obama didn’t do that. Why not?

You see, everyone who mattered thought that Hillary was going to be the next President. The Democrats believed it so much, they decided to stick to the extremist pick on the theory that HRC was going to ram through a leftist candidate to replace Scalia and swing the court to the left. 

The Republicans, with nothing to lose, decided to call the bet and see what was in the cards.

The Democrats went all in on an HRC victory. Trump’s win destroyed all of that. During the primaries, the Democrats could look and see that they were likely not going to win the 2020 Presidential elections. They knew that and were going to cheat their way to a Biden victory, boot Biden out of office using the 25th Amendment and place Kamala Harris in the Whitehouse as the first female President. RBG could retire and be replaced with a younger woman, who would likely serve on SCOTUS for 40 or 50 years. 

Then RBG died. 

Now the Democrats are going to lose the Presidency, their hope of having the first Female President, and they are going to lose the Supreme Court. 

That, frankly, pisses them right the fuck off.  

Food for thought

 When a nation wants to prepare for starting a war, they train their forces to the best level possible. Then they rest and perform maintenance. These two steps ensure the highest level of readiness. 

This could explain the abrupt decrease in violent protests. The next two weeks will tell.