The Everlasting Phelps

Ponceman is awesome:

The fifth of November.

Oakland liberated.

Dear world:

Mealy cheese is not a substitute for bachamel in lasagna.  It’s just mealy cheese, not a delicious creamy sauce.

-TEP

Team USAF could use some help.  The yearly fundraiser is almost over, and giving is way down.  VALOUR-IT puts voice activated laptops and other in the laps of wounded servicemen and women who don’t have hands to use them with anymore.  Every bit helps.

From one of the beneficiaries, Chuck Ziegenfuss:

In 2005, I was wounded.  For some months, I was unable to use my hands.  They were simply too badly damaged from the blast, and the surgeries to make them usable again left me unable to do anything for myself.

Then came Soldier’s Angels, who gave me a laptop, and paired it with special software that allowed me to control the computer, using only my voice!  Imagine, being able to do anything you can do with a mouse and keyboard, using just your voice.  For me, it allowed me to do one thing, that I could do before I was wounded.

That one thing–when everything: feeding, cleaning, scratching, everything had to be done for me–that one thing I could do for myself allowed me to connect to my soldiers, friends, and family. That one thing… that one thing began a long road to recovery.  It gave me hope; that I could learn to do other things like I did before.

More from Minnesota’s shutdown (that no one is noticing.)

Hundreds of bars, restaurants and stores across Minnesota are running out of beer and alcohol and others may soon run out of cigarettes — a subtle and largely unforeseen consequence of a state government shutdown.

In the days leading up to the shutdown, thousands of outlets scrambled to renew their state-issued liquor purchasing cards. Many of them did not make it.

Now, with no end in sight to the shutdown, they face a summer of fast-dwindling alcohol supplies and a bottom line that looks increasingly bleak.

“It’s going to cripple our industry,” said Frank Ball, executive director of the Minnesota Licensed Beverage Association, which represents thousands of liquor retailers in the state.

Isn’t this a due process violation?  Haven’t the court repeatedly said that a behavior cannot be licensed if the state refuses to issue licenses for it?

Doesn’t this mean that anyone in Minnesota could sell liquor, since the licensing agency is failing its responsibility to provide due process?  Given that a constitutional amendment was required to prohibit alcohol, and another amendment was passed to remove this prohibition, it would seem that the right to buy and sell alcohol is a fundamental right, and failing to issue licenses to do so is an effective violation of this right.

I would like to point out a few things to the people hysterical about the Casey Anthony verdict.

It is the job of the prosecution to prove to the jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the crime in question was committed by the person accused, with certainty and specificity.

It is not the job of the jury to fill in the gaps left by the prosecution, or to fix the prosecution’s case.  In fact, it is the job of the jury to acquit when the evidence is lacking.

The prosecution did not prove a cause of death.

The prosecution therefore did not prove that the death was caused by another person, because they don’t know the cause of death.

The prosecution therefore did not prove homicide.  Without homicide, there can be no murder or manslaughter.

You want to blame someone?  Blame the DA who decided to level murder charges without even knowing with any certainty or specificity that a murder had even occurred.

p.s. Stop watching Nancy Grace.  She’s wrong much, much more than she’s right, and she’s a shining example of why prosecutors screw up cases like this, having been one herself.