How deep does the Fast and Furious rabbit hole go?

Another murder in Mexico has been linked to the walked guns.

Fortunately, the administration is hard at work on the case!

By which I mean that the whistleblower has been fired. I don’t share his sentiment regarding the ATF; I don’t particularly mind that it might be abolished because of this fiasco. If this goes all the way to the top of the Justice Department (or higher!), then they should all be fired or impeached or whatever is appropriate to their station.

I’ve made my opinion of the agency clear in the past; these revelations regarding the ATF’s blatant disregard for the law strengthen my feelings on the matter.

Abolishing the ATF is just the beginning; if I had my way, we’d also get rid of the NFA and the 1968 GCA.

Fatalize

Today’s selection is a twofer; it appears in both Soul Calibur Legends and Tales of Symphonia.

Lloyd Irving, the protagonist of Tales of Symphonia (the all-time best-selling Tales of game), crosses franchises to appear as a guest character in Soul Calibur Legends, an action-adventure spinoff of the Soul Calibur fighting game series.

Legends proved to be unsuccessful; it received poor reviews, and is the worst-selling game in the Soul franchise.

That said, it does reveal exactly how Siegfried becomes the monster Nightmare in between the Soul Edge and Soul Calibur games. Whether fighting game exposition and plot development is worth playing a bad game is a decision you’ll have to make for yourself, though.

Quote of the Indeterminate Time Interval – Hillary Clinton redux!

Victor Davis Hanson dredges up an old quote from then-Senator Clinton:

I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.

Of course, that was back in 2003, when dissent was patriotic, and wars were evil, and a Democrat wasn’t in the White House.

As Secretary of State Clinton made clear yesterday, that is no longer the case.

We don’t have a justice system

We have a legal system.

Trite, but accurate; any system that could result in decisions like this can hardly be called just.

Just because the Supreme Court has handed down a decision doesn’t mean that it’s right.

In all, more than 60,000 people—including 7,600 in North Carolina—were forcibly sterilized in the United States in the name of “progress.” Progressives of the time lauded the decision in Buck. Individual rights, they firmly believed, should not be allowed to stand in the way of collective progress. Justice Brandeis called Buck an example of properly allowing states the freedom to “meet modern conditions by regulations which a century ago, or even half a century ago, probably would have been rejected as arbitrary and oppressive.” [emphasis added]

Of course, once some individual rights have been sacrificed on the altar of “collective progress,” it becomes easier to do away with others; look at how effective the TSA is at negating the fourth amendment in the name of collective security, or how individuals’ right to choose how to provide for their own health care is being overruled by the federal decree that all must purchase qualifying insurance or be punished.

It’s a slippery slope, but that makes it no less true; whenever the state becomes more powerful, it does so at the individual’s expense.

And the individual can rarely reclaim what the state has appropriated.