photo: Karen L. Myers
Anna McKnight falls early in the 4th Race

Last year’s races encountered both a hailstorm and gusts of high wind powerful enough to knock over a porta-potty containing at the time a prominent local physician. Nature, by way of compensation, this year delivered a day that seemed like summer.

As the Winchester Star reports, close to 3000 spectators attended the Blue Ridge Hunt’s traditional Spring Races at Woodley Farm near Berryville.

The meet featured 9 races, flat and over timber, and attracted competitors from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

The scariest moment came early in the 4th Race for the Clarke Courier Cup when Tap Tap, a nine-year-old bay gelding, mistimed his takeoff and stumbled over a hurdle, causing jockey Anna McKnight of Monkton, Maryland to come off.

The fall resulted in a broken wrist and a compressed vertebrae and McKnight needed to be taken to Winchester Medical Center, but happily is expected to make a full recovery, and will soon be resuming riding.

Earlier in the day, Sam Cockburn, who won in his first ride last weekend at Casanova, riding the 8 year-old chestnut gelding Old Fellow in the 2nd Race One Mile Seven Furlong Amateur/Novice Hurdle also suffered a fall, and he too suffered a broken wrist. Cockburn is expected to be sidelined from racing for four weeks.
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Correction 3/11: I had originally identified the rider who suffered the broken wrist as Anna McKnight, but my wife Karen assured me that I was wrong and that she had heard officials identifying the victim otherwise, so I re-wrote my posting.

Anna McKnight’s mother, Mrs. H. Turney McKnight, MFH of Maryland’s Elkridge-Harford Hunt, however, read the posting, and wrote a comment informing me that it was indeed her daughter who experienced the more serious injury last Saturday.—————————————————-

Further correction, 3/11:

A commenter informs me that Sam Cockburn, the jockey who fell in the Second Race, contrary to the Winchester Star report, also fractured a wrist.
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My apologies for all the mistakes and confusion and best wishes to both riders for a speedy recovery.

Described as somewhere in China, it’s really a neglected suspension bridge, constructed in the 1950s (and not recently repaired) located in the Akaiski Mountains of Southern Japan. It’s called Musou Tsuribashi.

6:31 video

One wonders if the videographer came back the same way.

Two female conservative columnists today discuss the media’s indulgent treatment of gaffemaster Biden.

CORRECTION: Should be: Two female columnists, one a Fox News commentator of democrat party background, and our own Michelle Malkin today discuss the media’s indulgent treatment of gaffemaster Biden.

(Thanks to Bohemian Conservative for enlightening me on the political background of Kirsten Powers.)
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Kirsten Powers, in the New York Post:

Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as his running mate prompted a small wave of warnings about Biden’s propensity for gaffes. But no one imagined even in a worse-case scenario such a spectacular bomb as telling donors Sunday to “gird your loins” because a young president Obama will be tested by an international crisis just like young President John Kennedy was.

Scary? You betcha! But somehow, not front-page news.

Again the media showed their incredible bias by giving scattered coverage of Biden’s statements.

So what gives?

The stock answer is: “It’s just Biden being Biden.” We all know how smart he is about foreign policy, so it’s not the same as when Sarah Palin says something that seems off.

Yet, when Biden asserted incorrectly in the vice-presidential debate that the United States “drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon,” nobody in the US media shrieked. (It was, however, covered with derision in the Middle East.) Or when he confused his history by claiming FDR calmed the nation during the Depression by going on TV, the press didn’t take it as evidence that he’s clueless.

And Biden is the foreign-policy gravitas on the Democratic ticket, so his comments are actually even more disconcerting. ...

Part of the problem is their “Obama love,” but we’re also seeing the media elite’s belief – prejudice – that anyone with an R behind their name is dumb. So, if they say something dumb, they must be dumb. A Democrat, like Biden, can make wildly inaccurate or outrageous comments and they are ignored because the TV and press insiders feel they “know who he really is.”

On the stump recently, Sen. Biden declared he had “three words” for what the nation needs: “J-O-B-S.”

Lucky for him, his name isn’t Dan Quayle, or that would have followed him for the rest of his career.

Michelle Malkin:

Hysterical Sarah Palin-bashers on the unhinged left and elitist right have dominated campaign press coverage and pop culture. They’ve ridiculed her family, her appearance and her speech patterns. They’ve derided her character, her parenting skills, her readiness and her intellect.

Meanwhile, the increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Joe Biden gets a pass. What does the guy have to do to earn the relentless scrutiny and merciless mockery he deserves? Answer: wear high heels, shoot caribou and change the “D” next to his name to an “R.” ...

Dan Quayle will have “POTATOE” etched on his gravestone. But how many times have late-night comedians and cable shows replayed the video of senior statesman and six-term Sen. Biden’s own spelling mishap last week while attacking McCain’s economic plan?

“Look, John’s last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the No. 1 job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S.”

No, Joe. “D’-O-H” is a three-letter word.

Nightly news shows still haven’t tired of replaying Palin’s infamous interview with Katie Couric. But how many times have they replayed Biden’s botched interview with Couric last month—in which he cluelessly claimed: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”

Er, here’s what really happened: Roosevelt wasn’t president when the market crashed in 1929. As for appearing on TV, it was still in its infant stages and wasn’t available to the general public until at least 10 years later.

During the lone VP debate earlier this month, the increasingly erratic, super-gaffetastic Biden demonstrated more historical ignorance that Palin would never be allowed to get away with: “Vice President Cheney’s been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history,” he said. “He has the idea he doesn’t realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that’s the executive—he works in the executive branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.”

Article 1 of the Constitution defines the role of the legislative branch, not the executive branch. You would think someone who has served 36 years in government—the same someone who is quick to remind others of his high IQ and longtime Senate Judiciary Committee chairmanship—would know better.

Biden’s erratic and gaffetastic behavior is the least of America’s worries. He’s worse than a blunderbuss. He’s an incurable narcissist with chronic diarrhea of the mouth. He’s a phony and a pretender who fashions himself a foreign policy expert, constitutional scholar and worldly wise man. He’s a man who can’t control his impulses.

And he could be a heartbeat away.

A lot of my liberal classmates were going on, in their snobbish Ivy League way, about how the great Obamessiah wrote his own speeches, but that dumb Sarah Palin, who went to an infra dig school that wasn’t Yale or Harvard, needed to have her acceptance speech written for her.

Well, as Erick Erickson reports:

Halfway through Sarah Palin’s speech tonight at the RNC, people following the speech noticed she was deviating from the prepared text.

According to sources close to the McCain campaign, the teleprompter continued scrolling during applause breaks. As a result, half way through the speech, the speech had scrolled significantly from where Governor Palin was in the speech. The malfunction also occurred during Rudy Giuliani’s speech, explaining his significant deviations from his speech.

Unfazed, Governor Palin continued, from memory, to deliver her speech without the teleprompter cued to the appropriate point in her speech.

Palin did just fine.

But look how well that really, really smart Obama did when placed in the same inconvenient situation.

1:13 video
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Also today, Jonathan Martin disagrees about Palin winging it.

Perhaps there were moments where it scrolled slightly past her exact point in the speech. But I was sitting in the press section next to the stage, within easy eyeshot of the Teleprompter. I frequently looked up at the machine, and there was no serious malfunction. A top convention planner confirms this morning that there were no major problems.

Is he merely quibbling? I don’t know how common it is for teleprompters to run past the point speakers have reached myself, and I don’t think it’s possible to determine which of the witnesses is correct on this one.

Thanks to commenter Pete-at-home who brought this to my attention.

James Gordon Meek, in the New York Daily News (7/25) reports that Army officials took steps to refute an email posted by the Blackfive blog on July 23, sourced to an unidentified “Air Force captain.”

The latest chain e-mail smear against Barack Obama: He “blew off” troops at an Afghan base to shoot hoops for a publicity photo.

The letter was apparently written by a Utah Army National Guard intelligence officer in a linguist unit at Bagram Airfield who claimed the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee was rude to G.I.s.

“As the soldiers where [sic] lined up to shake his hand he blew them off,” wrote the Task Force Wasatch “battle captain.”

But angry Army brass debunked the Obama-bashing soldier’s allegations, which went viral Thursday over the Web and on military blogs such as Blackfive.

The e-mail claims Obama repeatedly shunned soldiers on his way to the Clamshell – a recreation tent – to “take his publicity pictures playing basketball.”

“These comments are inappropriate and factually incorrect,” said Bagram spokeswoman Army Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green, who added that such political commentary is barred for uniformed personnel.

Obama didn’t play basketball at Bagram or visit the Clamshell, she said. Home-state troops were invited to meet him, but his arrival was kept secret for security reasons.

“We were a bit delayed … as he took time to shake hands, speak to troops and pose for photographs,” Nielson-Green said.

On his Mouth of the Potomac blog, Meeks reports that the email’s author has issued a retraction.

Now the Bagram captain is dialing back, having signed the viral e-mail with his name, rank and unit – a possible violation of military regulations barring political statements. This morning, he sent The Mouth a new statement (punctuation corrected):

“I am writing this to ask that you delete my email and not forward it. After checking my sources, information that was put out in my email was wrong. This email was meant only for my family. Please respect my wishes and delete the email and if there are any blogs you have my email portrayed on I would ask if you would take it down too. Thanks for your understanding.”

An Army officer familiar with the incident told The Mouth today that the writer is “devastated that the letter was made public. It was never his intention that it go beyond members of his family.”

There is some confusion which needs to be cleared up. Blackfive deliberately identified the email’s author as an air force officer in order to protect his anonymity, which effort failed. Some reports claim that the army captain had mistakenly forwarded a hoax email of which he was not the author. Apparently, such reports are incorrect.
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Snopes likes to pretend to be a purely objective source, but political prejudice creeps in. Snopes was perhaps a little overly eager to debunk this particular account.
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Confederate Yankee (7/25) correctly notes that the official refutation only contradicts two minor details and notes that we haven’t seen any refutation of the second email posted by Blackfive one day later.

It is vitally important for us to know that Barack Obama didn’t play basketball in Afghanistan, nor did he visit a specific tent. We should be grateful that Meek ferreted out the truth and debunked those scurrilous allegations.

But LTC Nielson-Green’s refutation of these two rather minor specific points does not at all address the most important allegation made in the viral email, the author’s perception that soldiers on base were “blown off” by the junior Senator.

In fact, the PAO admits that Obama only met with selected soldiers. Only service-persons from Illinois were invited to meet him, and soldiers not from Illinois (the author of the email is from Utah) were indeed not met by the junior Senator. Though no doubt a touchy situation for the military, the key premise holds.

The same handful of faces are seen in all the pictures released to the media from Obama’s visit. If you were not a soldier from Illinois or otherwise selected serviceman, you were not allowed to meet Obama. The question then arises whether the decision to limit contact with the troops was a decision made by the military brass, if that was a decision made by the Obama campaign, or by joint agreement.

The second email published, from someone at an air base as Obama swung through Iraq stated in part that Obama’s visit was “A disgraceful PR stunt, using the troops as a platform for his ego and campaign.”

To date the second email has gone unchallenged and a senior officer I interviewed confirmed on background that Obama’s visit to Iraq was nothing more than a campaign stop masquerading congressional delegation visit.

Captain P’s retraction may very possibly have merely been a prudential response to pressure from command. It is hardly unlikely that he was threatened with prosecution for violating regulations by publishing political statements.

The left would like to believe that the US military is full of Obama supporters, involuntarily-closeted gays, and disgruntled pacifists all itching to vote democrat, but none of that is true. Common sense suggests that Obama would be wise to restrict access of military personnel to his campaign-oriented visits to the front. Most of those stationed in Afghanistan have probably already served in Iraq, and they just might not be the world’s biggest fans of someone publicly committed to reversing their efforts and throwing away their personal sacrifices. Obama doesn’t need to be photographed surrounded by hostile, booing troops.

Iraqis are permitted to own fully-automatic AK-47s in US-occupied Iraq. But the BATF won’t let you own an Akins Accelerator, a gizmo which attaches to the trigger mechanism of a Ruger 10/22 to achieve full-auto function.

0:37 video

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6/23 CORRECTION:

Mr. Akins has posted in the Comments section, correcting my erroneous description of the Akins Accelerator. Mr. Akins says:

Nothing attaches to the trigger mechanism and it does not achieve full auto function because the trigger is functioned once for each and every shot. The entire barrel/receiver/trigger group reciprocates backwards under recoil removing the trigger completely from the finger and compressing a spring which then forces the barrel/receiver/trigger group back forward again.

Mr. Akins also provided a link to an illustration of what goes on.

link

A bitter divorce fight unexpectedly brought down what had seemed to be a shoo-in Republican successor to a retiring incumbent Republican senator, and promoted an obscure state senator occupying a safe inner-city legislative seat to Washington. One stem-winding speech later, Barack Obama was widely viewed as presidential timber, and after a few Clinton campaign stumbles as the front-runner.

When there is a serious possibility that Barack Obama could be the next President of the United States, it seems desirable to look closely at his background, and it is impossible to understand the real character and background of Barack Obama without understanding Chicago, and The Chicago Way

John Kass, in the Chicago Tribune, opines that The Chicago Way isn’t the tough-guy creed of outdoing your opponent in aggression proposed by the Sean Connery-played cop in The Untouchables (1987):

He [ Al Capone] puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue…” says Connery’s cop. “That’s the Chicago Way.”

and suggests a very different definition.

The Chicago Way.

What is it? Is it easily abused? Is it dangerous in the wrong hands?

This is critical, as the nation’s eyes turn toward Chicago’s federal building, where Barack Obama’s personal real estate fairy, Tony Rezko, stands trial on federal corruption charges.

The phrase must be put in context, something the national media fails to do when they portray Obama as the boy king drawing the sword from the stone, ready to change America’s politics of influence and lobbyists, ignoring the fact that Chicago ain’t Camelot. ...

In the past, a few reporters have applied “The Chicago Way” to our pizza, theater and opera, thereby embarrassing themselves beyond redemption. ...

Chicago’s mob—we call it the Outfit—was slapped last summer by federal prosecutors in the Operation Family Secrets trial that convicted Outfit bosses, and cops and put political figures in with them. We’ve had our chief of detectives sent to prison for running the Outfit’s jewelry-heist ring. And we’ve had white guys with Outfit connections get $100 million in affirmative action contracts from their drinking buddy, Mayor Richard Daley, who must have seen them pink and white and male at some point.

That’s the Chicago Way.

“This country was built on taxes,” said a Democratic machine hack, Cook County Commissioner Deborah Sims, as she and other Democrats prepared to slap Chicago with the highest sales tax of any major city in the country.

Her belief, that America was built on taxes, is one of the unique features of our own city’s history, which reportedly began in 1776, when the Daleys boldly declared our independence from the English king.

“There’s not that many political hacks in Cook County,” Sims insisted after the tax hike.

Not that many hacks? The only one reporters need to bother about is also involved at the same federal building: the mayor’s own Duke of Patronage, Robert Sorich.

Sorich has been found guilty by a jury, but the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals above the Rezko courtroom is still deciding whether to redeem the jury or redeem the mayor, who’d much rather have Sorich happy than Obama in the White House.

Sorich was convicted two years ago of running the mayor’s massive and illegal patronage operation, and he’s still not in prison. Thugs, morons, idiots, and convicts were put on the city payroll to work the precincts so that Daley could keep getting elected. Obama’s spokesman, David Axelrod, defended Daley patronage in a Tribune op-ed piece.

The Daley family’s parish priest in Bridgeport, Rev. Dan Brandt, lovingly compared Sorich to Jesus Christ as both had troubles with the law.

“People often say, what would Jesus do?” he said, loyal not only to his faith but to the 11th Ward’s place at the head of Chicago Way. “I put a twist on it and say, ‘What would I do for Jesus?’ With whom Robert has a lot in common as far as legal problems … [The Lord] was a convicted felon. And Robert was convicted, and so he may have a lot in common with Jesus.”

When the parish priest does right by the patronage boss to protect the mayor who gets endorsed by that great reformer Sir Barack of O’bama, that’s the Chicago Way.

Naturally, there are some squares who don’t think taxpayers should pave the Chicago Way to make it easy for Rezko to help purchase the senator’s dream house in a kinky deal exposed by the Tribune and still not fully explained.

“It’s really the Old Chicago Way,” said Jay Stewart, executive director of the Better Government Association. “In the old days they would pretty much admit it up front, and now they deny it. It’s essentially about power, access to government jobs, government contracts and taking care of your own.”

Don’t miss his 2:49 video
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Corrected: I had mistakenly spoken of Jack Ryan as an incumbent, one of our commenters was kind enough to refresh my memory.

The pious and politically correct are throwing a hissy fit this morning over (a conservative radio talk show host I’m not familiar with, named) Bill Cunningham referring to someone currently active in politics named Barack Hussein Obama:

Juan Cole gets out his portable soap box, and starts rhetoricizing:

(Barack) is a name to be proud of. It is an American name. It is a blessed name. It is a heroic name, as heroic and American in its own way as the name of General Omar Nelson Bradley or the name of Benjamin Franklin. And denigrating that name is a form of racial and religious bigotry of the most vile and debased sort. It is a prejudice against names deriving from Semitic languages!

Well, not really. If Jewish and Arabic identities were both Semitic and just the same, why, Israelis and Palestinians would doubtless be living happily in peace.

It’s true that many Biblical names, like Benjamin, are popular personal names used by Christian Europeans and Americans for centuries, and some Biblical names are used in cognate forms by Muslims as well as Christians, but both Barack and Hussein are not Biblical and therefore have no real resemblance to Benjamin.

Both are Arabic names. The press has been confusing Barack (barraaq) “flashing, bright, shining, glittering” with Barakat (barakaat) “”blessings, good fortunes, prosperities.” Hussein (diminutive of Hasan) means “beautiful.” *

General Bradley was doubtless named for Omar Khayyam, the Persian author of the Rubiyat, which was extremely popular in the Edward Fitzgerald translation in the Victorian era. A one-shot use of the name of a Persian poet does not demonstrate a vital and indigenous American tradition of the use of Islamic Arabic personal names.

America is, it’s true, a nation of immigrants, but we do not have any established, familiar naturalized population of Luos from Kenya. People have been elected president whose ancestors did not arrive on the Mayflower, but, in fact, Americans have not actually elected any representatives of most well-known immigrant groups to the presidency at all. American presidents have all been of English or Scots Irish descent, with three Dutch, two German, and one single Irish Catholic exception.

No Swedes, Poles, Italians, Finns, Danes, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Norwegians, Belgians, Lithuanians, or Jews have ever occupied the White House.

The contributions to America in war and peace of Jews and Roman Catholics have not been small, and yet there has been a single Catholic president and not one Jewish one.

Mitt Romney’s Mormonism proved a serious obstacle to his securing support in many parts of the United States, and his background is clearly considerably more conventional and familiar than Obama’s.

The left has a natural interest in drawing a line forbidding raising the question of Obama’s background, or poking fun at it, as Eric Zorn tries to do, and wants to arrange that anyone violates their taboo at peril of being ostracized and designated a bigot. But Barack Hussein Obama is alarmingly unknown, has campaigned in deliberately vague and obfuscatory style, and has successfully gotten a lot farther than normally happens by slick marketing and superficial glamor. He can hardly expect to claim an affirmative action presidency as a massive national gesture of racial compensation, while evading all scrutiny and discussion, and forbidding derisive mockery, of his alien names and exotic personal and political background.

Romney’s Mormonism was evaluated, for good or ill, by the public freely, and people made up their own minds how they felt about that. The same thing is going to happen with respect to Obama’s Islamic personal names and his Islamic childhood and education in Indonesia, and it should. Attempts to erect a protective barrier of political correctness to preclude discussion, or joking, about Obama’s exoticism will fail.
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*Salahuddin Ahmed, A Dictionary of Muslim Names, New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Back on February 13th, the Telegraph (CY refers to March 12th, presumably via a typo) reported that more than a 100 Steyr Mannlicher HS50 .50 caliber sniper rifles sold to Iran had been captured by US forces in raids on insurgent arms caches and safe houses.

The story was widely repeated by media outlets and blogs, and obviously did considerable harm to the public image and reputation of the renowned Austrian arm maker.

Steyr Mannlicher issued a rebuttal on March 29th, which I unfortunately have not previously seen.

But Confederate Yankee more recently looked into the matter, interviewing informed US military sources, and has debunked the story completely.

Personally, I’m delighted to learn that the history of the company succeeding as manufacturer of the illustrious Mannlicher Schonauer remains unblemished, and that we Americans can buy Jeff Cooper-designed Steyr Scout rifles anytime we want without a qualm.

Never Yet Melted extends apologies and best wishes to Steyr Mannlicher GmbH. & Co KG

and to

Ferdinand Ritter von Mannlicher.

Original erroneous post

I should know better. Anonymity of the original source is always a dead giveaway that the item is a hoax.

Some alert classmates spotted yesterday’s “Denver vs. New Orleans” as hoax email which has appeared in several variant forms, and which is recorded on Snopes.

The moral is that one should always take the time to investigate these things, no matter how agreeable to one’s own prejudices and preconceptions a particular item may be. I get the dunce cap for today.

Hat tips, kudos, and thanks to Rodger Kamenetz and Stephen Frankel for the correction.

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs yesterday illuminated the impact of Google’s shameful surrender to censorship at the behest of the Communist government of China by linking

tiananmen – Google Image Search.

AND

tiananmen – Google Image Search in China.

When I visited Little Green Footballs earlier today, and attempted to compare Google image search results, clicking on the China-version link resulted in my browser being automatically redirected to the US version. I found it impossible to access the censored China version.

US url: http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

China url: http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen
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RETRACTION

I leapt to the conclusion that Google had deliberately arranged to preclude US viewers from accessing the China-censored-version of the Tiananmen Image Search, but my wife informed me that the China url worked on her PC.

I found, looking into the matter further, that the url worked in Firefox on my own PC. Subsequent reports from other people tell me that the url works inconsistently in MS Explorer on other machines. It is not possible for me to identify the causes, but it seems most likely that these varying results are occasioned simply by the interactions of different software, and are not the result of any deliberate action by Google.

When we commented yesterday negatively on the Supreme Court decision in Gonzales, et. al. v. Oregon, we must confess that we had not yet gotten around to reading the actual decision. Nor were we familiar with the specifics of the Oregon law. Its title, the Oregon Death With Dignity Act (ODWDA), had precisely the ring of liberal double-speak to it, and we had leapt (understandably, we would argue) to the conclusion that the act basically encompassed oldsters going to the doctor’s office to be treated in the manner of the veterinarian putting to sleep the family cat. The reality was clearly quite different.

(The Supreme Court decision states:)

The Oregon Death With Dignity Act (ODWDA) exempts from civil or criminal liability state-licensed physicians who, in compliance with ODWDA’s specific safeguards, dispense or prescribe a lethal dose of drugs upon the request of a terminally ill patient.

Since our own position is really that any rational adult ought to be able to buy, and use, any medication or consciousness-altering item he desires without a prescription, it is clear that we failed to recognize initially the curious occurrence of the court’s liberal majority arriving at a perfectly correct decision.

Justice Scalia seems to have suffered from the same knee-jerk reaction we did initially, which was joined by Justices Roberts and Thomas. But Clarence Thomas additionally wrote a separate dissent, commenting sarcastically:

I agree with limiting the applications of the CSA [Controlled Substances Act] in a manner consistent with the principles of federalism and our constitutional structure. Raich, supra, at _ (THOMAS, J., dissenting); cf. Whitman, supra, at 486—487 (THOMAS, J., concurring) (noting constitutional concerns with broad delegations of authority to administrative agencies). But that is now water over the dam. The relevance of such considerations was at its zenith in Raich, when we considered whether the CSA could be applied to the intrastate possession of a controlled substance consistent with the limited federal powers enumerated by the Constitution. Such considerations have little, if any, relevance where, as here, we are merely presented with a question of statutory interpretation, and not the extent of constitutionally permissible federal power. This is particularly true where, as here, we are interpreting broad, straightforward language within a statutory framework that a majority of this Court has concluded is so comprehensive that it necessarily nullifies the States’ “ ‘traditional . . . powers . . . to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens.’ ? Raich, supra, at _, n. 38 (slip op., at 27, n. 38). The Court’s reliance upon the constitutional principles that it rejected in Raich—albeit under the guise of statutory interpretation—is perplexing to say the least. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.

In other words, Thomas still thinks the Constitution ought to preclude such Federal intrusions, but the since the Court already decided otherwise in Raich, what can he do but dissent from the tortured reasoning used to achieve a different result this time?
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I was just telling my wife: I can remember being wrong once before. I think it was in 1954…