**************
On the other hand we were spared the negative effects of the rain by the timely emergency repairs made on the roof of The Manse until the insurance adjuster can inspect the damage, inside and out, and make a determination of what our insurance will cover and what it won't.In any case, The Manse is going to need a new roof sooner than we'd thought as the shingles used when it was built were substandard, at least according to the roofer. The supposed 20-year shingles last about 12-14 years, tops, and we just reached the 14-year mark. (This could be yet another reason why the general contractor who built The Manse ended up in prison.)
**************
The bleating from the Left continues unabated in the aftermath of the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision. It also appears they really don't understand or don't want to understand that the decision was based upon laws and parts of the Constitution that override the mandates of ObamaCare. Then again, they only like the court decisions that back up their increasingly authoritarian bent and restrict the constitutionally enumerated rights of the people.They have blown the import of the decision all out of proportion, equating it with a ban on birth control . This is where reason has fled and emotion is the driving force behind all of the protests and lamentations about the loss of 'a women's right to choose the method of birth control', which it is not. But if they do not get that out there they aren't fitting the feminist narrative and they could be drummed out of the feminazi corps. They refuse to understand that it isn't all about them. It isn't about them at all.
They somehow think it's perfectly OK to tell business owners they must surrender their religious beliefs just in order to stay in business. They honestly see no problem with this, particularly if the religion in question is Christianity or Judaism.
**************
Fewer Americans are saying America is the greatest nation on Earth. Unfortunately I have to agree with them on some points. Much of that decline must be laid at the feet of Congress, the President, and the courts (I'm not singling out any particular congress or president because a lot of them have had a hand in it). Many of the actions they have taken over the decades have hamstrung our economy, our education system, our foreign policy, and much else, all while trying to convince us it was “good for us.”I'm not going to go into any detail, but I think this video, and excerpt from HBO's The Newsroom, says it best.
**************
Here's a review of Jason Riley's Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder For Blacks To Succeed which covers how the 50 years of LBJ's Great Society has harmed black Americans.While the Great Society may have seemed like a humanitarian program, it was, at its base, a cynical means of ensuring a built-in Democrat voter base by ensnaring minorities into an endless cycle of government dependency...and it worked. Over $20 trillion has been spent on 'fighting' poverty since 1965 and the percentage of poor in our nation hasn't changed much since then. I'd say that qualifies as a failure.
**************
This isn't news to me.Resenting the Republic: Liberals Take Exception To Exceptionalism.
Exceptionalism goes up against the equal outcome doctrine so many of them have been programmed to believe. It doesn't matter to them that it's been exceptionalism that made our nation to begin with.
**************
I find that any time the perpetually offended Left is offended by someone like a retail chain, they go all out, calling for a boycott of the offender. But it seems lately that these calls are going unheeded, particularly since they aren't even part of the demographic for the very businesses they've been so offended by. These businesses won't even notice the boycott because the change is sales, if there even is any, is lost in the noise floor.A few examples: Chick-fil-A, Walmart, and now, Hobby Lobby. In the case of one of these, Chick-fil-A, the call had just the opposite effect.
After people started talking boycott over Dan Cathy’s views on gay rights, the stores were absolutely flooded with counterprotesters. The counterprotesters actually lived in the predominantly rural and Southern locations where Dan Cathy does most of his business, and they really liked Chick-fil-A, so it wasn’t much of a hardship to eat more of it. It is, of course, much harder to give up if you liked it enough to eat there regularly.And so it seems with Hobby Lobby, at least in regards to people saying they will buy more stuff there rather than less. Again, I doubt very much that the boycotters are within Hobby Lobby's target demographic.
It’s not that literally none of the passionate boycotters live in prime Chick-fil-A territory. But in those areas, they’re greatly outnumbered by social conservatives. So most of the people promising to boycott were really promising not to eat there on the occasional road trip. That was no match for the hordes of locals who turned out to give the company some extra love.
(H/T Instapundit)
**************
As we can see from this post, Anthropogenic Global Warming has gotten so bad that there's been absolutely no warming for 17 years and 10 months.We're doomed! DOOMED, I say!!
**************
The cognitive dissonance of the Harris vs Quinn Supreme Court ruling continues within the union halls.A number of leading labor leaders stated the decision “was a blow for working families.” However they chose to ignore the inconvenient fact that the plaintiffs in the case “were eight people from working families that just didn't see a need to be in a union.”
The SEIU pulled a fast one when they got home caregivers who received state funds to help care for their family members declared state workers and then proceeded to collect union dues even though these 'workers' never had the opportunity to vote whether they wanted to become unionized. The SCOTUS decided that they had not been properly given the choice and that declaring them state employees was a stretch, and set them free from the obligation to pay union dues.
It appears the labor unions still haven't realized that their very reason for being no longer exists and that more often than not they are the reason so many jobs no longer exist is because of their actions.