Tom Toles for July 29, 2010

Margarine tastes better than butter. To me.

Toles’ Thursday rant is here: http://tinyurl.com/37mzl83

Toles prepares to replace his sabots with a decent pair of sneakers….

I really do not want to enrage or insult anyone with this post. I personally happen to be pro-choice. Here, I say the exact same thing to Toles as as I say to my pro-life friends.

The Supreme Court of the US made a decision based on our Constitution. That is their job. If you don’t like the ruling then amend the Constitution.

Lib1.

Your tin foil hat needs a bit of re-working…

^^^^ he’s correct.

pro-life= political/ethical “opposition” to the law.

Yeah, the “strict constructionists” who vowed to uphold stare decisis threw out over 100 years of precedent and the phrase “well-regulated militia” with their ruling…

Freedom Of Association and Well Regulated Militia seem to have little in common. Especially considering FOA rights boils down to State law whereas WRM is written into the US Constitution.

You like margarine because your manufacturers are allowed to color it like butter. Here they have to leave it uncolored and that white paste is unappetizing.

You can have guns, but we’d better not catch you praying for help.

More guns please, mmmm.

12 Presidents have “snubbed” the Boy Scouts, including Reagan. The only ones making a fuss about this are Conservative blogs and Fox News. The Boy Scouts themselves don’t care. He’s had them at the White House a couple of times in the last year and will be addressing them via video tape. Quit being such a Fox News shill. =\

“You like margarine because your manufacturers are allowed to color it like butter. Here they have to leave it uncolored and that white paste is unappetizing.”

Does the coloring affect the taste? If not, then white, black, green or blue, if it still tastes the same I will still eat it. Though I had this “churn style” margarine this one time and it was so gross. It was a bit whiter looking, too. The smell of it in the pan when I was making sweet pork this one time, though… it made me so sick I almost threw up. Yet the pork came out tasting reasonably well… but it might have had something to do with pouring some of the margarine out. Anyway… it’s not the color, it’s the taste.

Jade:The color of margarine matters when you open the container and look at it. it’s not appetizing. It’s ok if you melt it in a pan, but when you just want to put some on your bread it’s a different story.

So I’m curious, did the government tell you you can’t have butter or a job because you can have guns, or is Toles just full of crap? Never mind, I think I know the answer.

^ Maybe a job making guns?

^^ I don’t often make toast. :( I use it almost exclusively for the pan these days.

@meetinthemiddle:

“Yeah, the “strict constructionists” who vowed to uphold stare decisis threw out over 100 years of precedent and the phrase “well-regulated militia” with their ruling…”

Not certain what you are trying to say. If we didn’t overturn stare decisis we would still have segregation- Brown v Board- Or did you approve of Plessy v Furguson?

You seem to be saying when you personally don’t like a decision it is OK to ignore stare decisis but if you do like the decision than the court must allow it to remain on the books. I can see why that concept would appeal to you but unfortunately that is not the law.i

I could have lots to say today… First Jade, I can remember when in our good old USA that margarine had no color but included a packet of yellowish dye that you could mix with it. -Dairy lobby wouldn’t let the margarine factory color it.- ….and, Hydrogenated fats definitely are bad for you. Margarines without Hydrogenation are available. I have my favorite.

Tigger, the idea that liberals are against guns is ludicrous. It is a fear raising tactic used by conservatives to get liberals to vote against their own candidates. This is one reason I dropped my membership in the NRA. They said an acquaintance of mine who was running for Congress was anti-gun and would take away everyone’s guns, when in fact, he is an avid hunter. I reasoned they were only an arm of the Republican party.

Time to get me another Glock.

^ You can only shoot yourself once. (effectively)

^^^ I am not sure which one I use (hydrogenated or not). I’ll have to look.

Margarine is hydrogenated and bad for you. Butter is not hydrogenated. We went back to butter after we found that it’s actually better for us. Just don’t use a lot of it.

^ We use this stuff called “Country Crock” and it says it doesn’t contain hydrogenated oil, but that could be like how a Chinese toy doesn’t contain lead.

It may or may not even be margarine, my classification system works like this: if ( !stristr( $item, “Butter” ) ) return “Margarine”;

iamthelorax: “So I’m curious, did the government tell you you can’t have butter or a job because you can have guns, or is Toles just full of crap?”

I’ll assume your question is genuine. In the second panel, the “guns vs butter” opposition has nothing to do with either dairy products or the right to bear arms. It’s the classic way of describing the choice, in government spending, between public improvement (“butter”) and military strength (“guns”). If we cut down our expenditures in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc., there would be more money available for job creation, infrastructure improvements, etc. (Note: Bringing the troops home would not necessarily require that we “lay off” any soldiers, resulting in an increased pool of unemployed; it’s cheaper to keep the same troop strength AT HOME than abroad).

The third panel, which DOES relate to the right to bear arms, is taking “guns” out of the metaphor from earlier and making it literal.

If I were Toles, I would have replaced his coda comment at the end with “Let them eat lead”, tying the two together…

^ I own a company which I gave it the name in German “Guns and Butter”.

Very common expression. I thought everybody was aware of it. So far whenever anyone asks for a translation from the German they always seem to know it.

For your health,,, Try margarine with little saturated fats. Butter has a lot. Margarines made with olive oil usually have the best consistency such as Smart Balance and Olivio.

Fritz:thanks for the info, this must be an american expression I’ve never heard of. The comic makes more sense now, I thought toles was ranting.

As for margarine, I still prefer butter. It’s more natural, never hydrogenated and I recently learned that the science that links saturated fats to heart disease is pretty weak. For anyone who’s interested in learning about the differing opinions on heart disease and the political history attached to nutrition, I suggest a book called Good Calories, Bad Calories.

…. I’m on a See Food diet… . If I see food, I eat it. =\

I used to be on that one :) I really had fun on that one. LOL!

I refuse to vote on that amendment unless we can we get cable and internet on the list.

The idea of guns slathered in butter… omg.. The possibilities are endless.

Lib1, what I’m saying is that a few Activist Right-wing Judges - who promised up and down that they would respect precedent and the rule of law - have been throwing out precedents right and left since they got in, including over a century of rulings that said the states did have a right to regulate firearms.

The last Supreme Court nominee who really told the truth was Robert Bork (of course he had a substantial track record to go with him), and everyone since has learned to testify that they’re just there to rubber stamp things.

You’re completely right that precedent and the Supreme Court have been on the wrong side of morality and history more than once, and how you feel about their recent rulings is mostly determined by one’s personal biases.

But the argument from the right that most of the country’s problems come from “activist liberal judges” is a pack of hogwash. Who’s been appointing judges for 20 of the last 30 years? And who stonewalled so many appointments that Clinton had open benches his whole 8 years? If there are any “activist liberal judges” left, they’re using walkers.

As a libertarian friend of mine once put it, neither the left nor the right like the bill of rights, they just argue about different numbers.

Looking it up on wikipedia, it’s unclear where the specific metaphor of “guns or butter” comes from, but it’s not strictly American. Both Goebbels and Goering used it in famous quotes: “We can do without butter. As much as we love peace, you cannot shoot with butter. You need guns to shoot”; and “Guns will make us strong. Butter will only make us fat” (although it could be argued that both were speaking literally as much as figuratively).

Stupid and more stupid…What else can be said?

Hey Churchill, thanks for an interesting morning… I’ve always heard the court has held more to the “militia” side of things, but lacked specifics.

Ironically, googling lead me to a long case list on saf.org (second amendmend foundation), with links to Findlaw for the actual case text. I say ironically, because the case law does seem to show over a century of precedent leaning towards regulation - only state regulation and not federal - including most of the cases you cite.

The 2008 and 2010 cases are exactly the reversal in debate, so are not to the point.

The first few (Dred Scott, Ex parte Milligan, and Cruickshanks) tend to have the racist “surely the founders wouldn’t have intended negros to have guns” line, ultimately ending up saying “it’s for the states to regulate”

saf.org’s summary of Pressler: “Second Amendment only a limitation on Congress, not the States.”

followed by Logan v US (1892), Miller v Texas (1894), Brown v Walker (1896), Robertson v Baldwin (1897), etc.

There are a number of other case precedents tying the 2nd amendment to militias (refusing to grant citizenship to people unwilling to bear arms for the govt under the second amendmend, allowing the president in times of war to ignore the second amendment)

Starting in the 1950’s, you start to see justices asserting the second amendment as an individual, not collective, right in footnotes to unrelated cases (i.e. the case is about the 1st amendment and the ruling is based on that, but in a footnote they also say they think the 2nd is the same), but nothing directly reversing the long precedent that states can legislate on the right to bear arms.

US v Miller (1939), which you cite, did overturn a federal statute regulating firearms but it did re-affirm what at that point was not quite a century of precedent that the states could legislate it.

Hey Churchill…

Here’s the first link Google gave me… don’t know about Hamlin, but SAF had a summary table of 2nd amendment cases (though this seems to be only cases in which the 2nd amendment is mentioned, not that it’s the main point or many times even relevant to the case)

http://www.saf.org/2ndAmendSupremeCourtTable.html

One of the big problems with the Constitution is that there really isn’t enough specificity to make any firm decisions. It was, after all, the minimum compromise a bunch of divergent viewpoints could sign on to.

For example the 10th amendment - any rights not explicitly enumerated here devolve to the people or the states. I mean which is it? The people *or* the states?

That seems to be the nub of the 2nd amendment precedent and the disagreement. Up to 2008, the precedent said “to the states” and let them regulate as they saw fit.

But that’s one of the big ambiguities off all cases coming to the Supreme Court - which rights are individual (i.e. can’t be superceded by any power) and which are collective. And at what level (if any) they can be legislated.

As I said to Lib1, precedent has been grossly wrong (morally) in the past (Plessy, Dred Scott, others), so precedent should be overturned in many cases. What irks me is 2 things 1) Every nominee since Bork comes to the hill saying precedent is the only important thing and of course they won’t change anything - which is a bald faced lie on both sides (though in Robert’s and Alito’s case, more egregious than most since the set about so quickly to toss precedent to the curb)

2) The right’s assertion that when they want to overturn precedent they’re “strict constructionists” but when someone else wants to do it they’re “activist judges”

With respect to the 2nd amendment specifically, it seems to me that the left uses the “well-regulated militia” thing as its crutch to justify regulation while the right simply likes to pretend the phrase isn’t even in the amendment.

To me, the Constitution wasn’t sufficient even in its day to actually run a government. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 strikes me as pretty off-the-books. Where in the constitution does it say the president can levy taxes to quintuple the size of the country by fiat?

It’s a minimalist document that a bunch of sharply divided parties could sign on to specifically because it didn’t have too much detail.

Given population density and the lack of compulsory military service, I think people should have to take training courses - including firing guns at a range - to demonstrate at least familiarity with the beast before getting licensed to buy guns. Law-abiding people owning guns isn’t a threat. Idiots with guns is.

meetinthemiddle – an interesting post. But what would you do with the militia clause? Should it enter into interpretation of the amendment or not, in your opinion?