Watch Michael Sam sack Johnny Manziel

What would happen if someone did "come and take it"?

Molon Labe. It's Greek for Fuck the World.

They say it means "come and take it." I like my translation better - it's more accurate. It's the rallying cry of the Gun Humper movement. They put it on signs. They put it on shirts. They use it in their sig lines.

Now I ask ya: If someone was walking through...oh, the area before the security checkpoints at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport...with a loaded rifle and wearing a Molon Labe shirt, and someone really did try to come and take it, how long after the inevitable shooting would it take those of us who don't sleep with a loaded rifle between the sheets to demand this shit be ended - and to vote out any politician who wouldn't?

I've been thinking about capital punishment lately...

I keep seeing this thought:

"They put dogs to sleep with lethal injection and don't screw it up this bad, why can't they get it right with prisoners?"

Before lethal injection was deemed The Only Proper Way To Put Down An Animal, you know they did testing: they had to have cleaned out the pounds and killed animal after animal with various doses of drugs until they knew how much of what drug to use to kill without pain or excessive cost.

You can't do that with humans, which means every lethal injection execution is a medical experiment. Josef Mengele would be so proud.

Cliven Bundy claims the Lord told him to fight a civil war against the feds

The real reason employers hate Obamacare: It makes them treat their workers better

In the bad old days before Obamacare got rid of exclusions for preexisting conditions, someone with a sick family member couldn't change jobs because they knew they'd never get new health insurance...which means that no matter how badly the employer screwed with the workers, those ones would never leave. (And have you noticed that the employees who are thusly tied to the company tend to get the shittiest jobs within it?)

Ever since ACA passed things have been different: To keep employees from walking into the HR office singing,

Take this job and shove it
I ain't working here no more
The ACA done passed
And took all the reasons
I was working for

You better not try to stand in my way
As I'm walking out the door
Take this job and shove it
I ain't working here no more

I've been working in this factory
For nigh on fifteen years
All this time I watched my woman
Drowning in a pool of tears

And I've seen a lot of good folks die
That had a lot of bills to pay
I'd give the shirt right off my back
If I had the guts to say

Take this job and shove it
I ain't working here no more
The ACA done passed
And took all the reasons
I was working for

You better not try to stand in my way
As I'm walking out the door
Take this job and shove it
I ain't working here no more

Well that foreman he's a regular dog
The line boss he's a fool
Got a brand new flattop hair cut
Lord he thinks he's cool

One of these days I'm gonna blow my top
And that sucker he's gonna pay
Lord I can't wait to see their faces
When I get the nerve to say

Take this job and shove it
I ain't working here no more
The ACA done passed
And took all the reasons
I was working for

You better not try to stand in my way
As I'm walking out the door
Take this job and shove it
I ain't working here no more

Take this job and shove it
I ain't working here no more
Take this job and shove it

...they have had to quit abusing the help. Which is a situation they truly hate.

The Somerset gas station proves Repukes don't really mean "government should run like a business"

Y'see, every freakin' time the government actually DOES run like a business, the Republicans freak out.

Social Security? It runs exactly like an insurance company, because it is one: takes in premium payments, invests them and uses the profits to fund its operation. The GOP has been trying to shut it down for years.

The VA also runs like a business. The Republicans have a two-pronged attack here: they severely underfund it, then bitch about how it's running poorly.

And then there's the Somerset Fuel Center, in Kentucky. The local gas stations are bleeding the locals dry, so the government does the only sane thing it can: It adds retail-style gas pumps to its city fuel point and lets anyone buy gas there. The Republicans are currently shitting kittens over this one.

If we have to draft a president, let's get someone good

How long will it take till MH17 is compared to abortion?

Every time a tragedy happens, the anti-abortion crowd jumps in soon after with "but the real tragedy is abortion!" When do you think they'll start burying us in that?

Can't we just get abortion practice declared an organized religion?

It's become increasingly apparent that your Get Out of Hell Free card can also get you out of obeying any law you don't like and also allows you to control everything and everyone around you. All you need do is claim it "goes against your deeply held beliefs" and boom!

Well, we have deeply held beliefs too. One of the more important ones is Women Should Never Be Forced Into Unwanted or Unsafe Pregnancies.

I figure we create a new IRS-Approved religion that sees abortion and birth control as sacraments and one of the thousands of fertility goddesses as our deity, and then we can overthrow every one of these damn laws. Look at it this way: if the cult that uses this damn thing...



can be an IRS-Approved Religion, then so can abortion. Call it the Church of Choice.

We're trying to fix the Hobby Lobby decision the wrong way

Attempting not to sound too lawyerly here, let's try this:

One of the things you've got to decide when you set up a business is its "form." There are five, and the one you choose determines three things: who will be liable for claims against the business, the number of owners the business can have, and whether the business or the owner will be liable for taxes.

The classic "mom and pop" is a Sole Proprietorship. One person, or a married couple, owns the company and taxes are paid on that person's individual income tax form.

"Johnson Brothers Plumbing" is a Partnership. To set one up, they'll hire a lawyer and execute a Partnership Agreement that stipulates the percentage of the business each of the four Johnson brothers owns, which also sets the percentage of the profits each brother will be paid. Taxes are paid the same way sole proprietorships' taxes are: as individual income.

Of course, when the Johnsons go to the lawyer the first thing the barrister will do is to beat them all unconscious for even thinking of setting up a partnership. Sole proprietorships and partnerships have one huge drawback: all liability falls onto the owners. If Eddie Johnson installs an underground sprinkler with a defective backflow preventer and herbicide makes its way into the city water system, everyone in the partnership could lose everything they have. When and if they wake up, the lawyer will convince them to create a Limited Liability Company - which has the same tax treatment as the first two forms of business, but gives some separation between their business and personal affairs.

For extra separation between you and your business, you incorporate. This structure forms a "corpus" - a person on paper - that owns the business. (The Citizens United ruling was an outrage not because it created corporate personhood - corporations have been people ever since there were corporations, my friend - but because it decided the corporate person had the same rights a natural person did. That is an outrage and needs to be reined in, but it's not what we're here for today.) Unless your corporation commits a major atrocity, any liability falls onto this corpus. By "major" I mean REALLY major - McDonald's sold Stella Liebeck a cup of coffee hot enough to boil a sixth of the skin off her body, but at no time was there ever thought given to sending postcards to all their shareholders: "We got sued for selling coffee hot enough to melt pig iron and lost, and part of the settlement is your responsibility; stick four cents in an envelope and mail it in before Friday."

The problem with the corporation form, for small business people who might want to protect themselves, is taxation: it's a flat 35 percent on all business profits. To allow "two guys and a backhoe" companies to incorporate the IRS created a special "small business" corporation, which is called "Subchapter S," that has a tax structure like an LLC or sole proprietorship. In exchange for this protection, the IRS limits the number of owners and the kinds of stock they can sell.

Now for the problem: Subchapter S, which Hobby Lobby uses, doesn't limit revenues. You can legally run a Subchapter S corporation that brings $3 billion across the threshold...we know this because Hobby Lobby, and half the buyout shops on Wall Street, are doing it.

And how to fix the Hobby Lobby decision once and for all: Cause the IRS to determine that any business earning more than $1.5 million per year is not eligible to operate under Subchapter S.