I’ve been so deep in the weeds today that I haven’t been able to do much more than skim the news reports about the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare.  I’ll find time to read the actual opinions on this and get back with my take on it, but here are my initial thoughts.

• My gut is that this just opened up a whole can of worms.  If the government can compel us to do something or pay a tax for disobedience, there isn’t a lot they can’t compel us to do or throw us into jail for failure.
• If Romney and every Republican running for national office have an ounce of gray matter between them, they will be screaming about this and promising to repeal this law before the echo of the oath of office is done reverberating from the steps of the Capitol.
• The President is about to try to impress me by taking a victory lap for his base of voters while trying to not piss off those of us who are going to have to pay for his foolishness if he’s re-elected.
• I agree with MaddMedic.  John Roberts may be smarter than the average bear on this one, at least as far as politics go.
• We survived Dred Scott.  We survived Plessey v. Ferguson.  We will survive this.  It may not be fun, but we will come through this eventually.
• Then again, our ancestors would be shooting by now.

June 25 seems to be a day for big things to happen.

• 1876 – George Armstrong Custer makes the fatal mistake of trying to live up to his grandiose reputation at the Battle of the Little Bighorn
• 1947 – The Diary of a Young Girl was first published, detailing the time that Anne Frank and her family hid from Nazi’s during the Holocaust.
• 1948 – Josef Stalin started learning the lesson that telling other countries “You can’t” doesn’t exactly mean they’ll start doing what you want them to do when the Berlin Airlift began.
• 1950 – North Korea started the Korean War when they invaded South Korea.  That particular war is still on-going, since a formal peace treaty has never been signed.
• 1996 – The Khobar Towers bombing occurred.

Boo has had a busy weekend.

We’re off to attend the annual family reunion in Indiana. I look forward to watching herds of children wander through a state park for the weekend. Y’all enjoy your weekend.

That’s one fine bullfrog right there.

Today is the day that Hallmark Cards thinks we ought to do what we ought to do all the time:  tell the good men who raised us that we appreciate it.

Yesterday, we gave Irish Woman’s Hoosier Dad a card from the kids and made sure he knew how important he was to us.  He and Hoosier Mom ‘adopted’ Irish Woman when she came home with one of their daughters and needed a little parenting and acceptance.  She kept coming back, and now she’s counted among the kids.

Hoosier Dad is one of the good ones, and I’m beginning to believe he’s also among the majority of good men who recognize their responsibilities and don’t find a way to get away from them.

So if you’re one of those dads, good on ya.  Enjoy your day and the new tie.

Boo’s first bowcaster

By now, most of you have heard about the man in Texas who, while defending his daughter from a man who was trying to molest her, beat said molesting piece of amphibian crap to death with his bare hands.  As Jay said, he was lucky to die quickly.

Now the local prosecutor has decided to take the case to a grand jury rather than make an executive decision to not prosecute.  I think I’m not alone when I say that this gentleman shouldn’t be going through this.  He saw his child in danger, reacted in a normal fashion, his child is still alive, and the good people of Texas are spared the cost of a trial, incarceration, and “treatment” for a slime that should have been strangled with his own umbilical cord and saved us all the trouble.  Instead of racking up attorney’s fees, he ought to be given a medal.

Of course, the bleeding hearts in that bastion of wishful thinking in an otherwise reality-based state, Austin, have an issue with the fact that the molesting jerk assumed ambient temperature after trying to diddle the wrong toddler:

“Assuming it’s true that this guy was molesting the daughter, and we don’t know what exactly happened at this point, he would then have the right to defend [her], and hit him enough to have him stop,” Harrington told FoxNews.com. “But you cannot summarily execute him, even though I can understand the anger he would have.”

Hippie, please.  The difference between “Get the hell off my daughter!” and “Someone get a hose” isn’t that much.  This guy was going off of a primal instinct to protect offspring.  My guess is he wasn’t exactly calibrating his pummeling to deliver just enough damage to make the mutant inbred bucktoothed twinkletoed piece of worm shit get away without turning his head from an innie into an outie.

The prosecutor in questions needs to cowboy up, and proclaim to the masses that killing to protect innocent life is not something to be investigated and prosecuted, and Mr. Harrington needs to get out of his ivory tower and into the real world where men who try to violate four year olds ought to be put down like rabid dogs.  No wait, that’s an insult to rabid dogs.  I at least support the use of pain-free methods to dispose of them.  Either way, I wish I was on that grand jury.