Dogs are arguably sentient beings. Dog "owners" have known this forever.

Ironically, this is probably legal (at least from our perspective) under the War Powers Act, but the continued use of US Special Forces all over the world, pretty much as we damn well please, is indicative of a foreign policy that has become completely militarized. Thank you, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

With a dedication (if they aren't insulted by it) to both Dana Garrett and Hank Foresman, for entirely different reasons. Aside from family commitments over the past week, the main thing that has kept me from posting or commenting on the government shut-down crisis is the simple fact that I wasn't sure there was anything original I could add to the discussion. I am so tired of talking points, and so tired of the gotcha  style of "discussing" this issue, and of people on both sides who either demonize or deify the most second-rate set of politicians on all sides that America has been cursed with since the Gilded Age or the Civil War. As the French soldier says in Monty Python and the Holy Grail , "I fart in your general direction." What I'm honestly beginning to think has happened is that far too many of us--with apologies to George Santayana--have redoubled our efforts when we have forgotten our aims. Here's my aim (and it is both more sim...

(That I can find, at least ...) This is the text of a report that will be released tomorrow night at the Division of Public Health meeting on non-nurse midwives tomorrow night in Clayton .  Follow the link for details. This will be a public meeting that begins the process of fixing the very bad mistake that the General Assembly and DPH made last year in passing HB 194 and essentially criminalizing the entire profession of midwifery and the practice of home birth. What most astounded me when I began talking with the bureaucrats and legislators who supported and passed this law is that they did so in response to a handful of "bad outcomes" to home births in the last year or so.  Let's not mince words, "bad outcomes" means perinatal or prenatal death, or something equally horrible for the mother.  But what I discovered that there was the typical rush to "do something" to be seen addressing the problem, and nobody stopped to determine whether these o...

Why is it great to be a "supposedly non-profit" corporate giant in the land of government-subsidized corporate welfare ... ... or why Federal anti-trust laws apparently do not apply to entities like Highmark no matter how horrible the corporation's conduct is ... Here's two new examples: 1.  Obamacare allows many procedures to be paid at a much higher rate if they are done in a hospital.   Get a stress test in a cardiologist's office?  Using exactly the same machine, the ACA says the cardiologist receives only about one-third the pay that a hospital would.  This is why most cardiology groups in Delaware have sold out to hospitals.   So what does the hospital do?  The hospital leaves the cardiology office open (the machine's already there, right?) and calls the building "a hospital clinic" so that it can continue to charge higher rates to insurance companies and Medicare than the original doctors could.  Got it? So the same thing happens with...

Many of my Libertarian friends are agnostic toward the idea of legislating same-sex marriage because they see this as extending the State's power to license another form of marriage while they would rather have the State completely out of the business of marriage all together. Me, too, but ... The reality is that not only do states use existing marriage status to deny legal benefits to same-sex couples, they also--quite consciously--use existing marriage laws to regulate sexual behavior. Don't believe me?  Just check out the latest brief filed by the State of Michigan in opposition to marriage equality. It does not get much plainer than this  —  One of the paramount purposes of marriage in Michigan --and at least 37 other states that define marriage as a union between a man and a woman-- is, and always has been, to regulate sexual relationships between men and women so that the unique procreative capacity of such relationships benefits rather than harms socie...

The lead-in: The Obama administration  promises  over and over again they are only sending arms to secular, freedom-loving Syrian rebels, not those Islamic jihadists associated with terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. The pay-off:   President Obama waived a provision of federal law designed to prevent the supply of arms to terrorist groups  to clear the way for the U.S. to provide military assistance to “vetted” opposition groups fighting Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. Some elements of the Syrian opposition are associated with radical Islamic terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, which was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pa., in 2001. Assad’s regime is backed by Iran and Hezbollah. The president, citing his authority under the Arms Export Control Act, announced today that he would “waive the prohibitions in sections 40 and 40A of the AECA related to such a transaction.”   Yep, tha...