We're Back. Monday recap

Milady and I are back from our weekend.  We got in last night at bedtime, and promptly fell into slumber.  I have been totally disconnected from the news, the internet, and TV this weekend, visiting family.  Lots of funny conversations on my brother-in-law's back porch.  Good food, good company, good whiskey, a totally off-line weekend.

So, Monday, and we're back.  I opened the interwebs and found that some asshole went on a shooting spree in California, evidently because he couldn't get laid.

A YouTube video posted Friday in which a young man complains of rejection by women appears to be connected to the attack, said Brown, who called the attack "the work of a madman."

Looks like he was doing it wrong.  Rather than posting YouTube videos explaining how you were rejected, try dressing nicer, talking to girls, and build a relationship.  You know, flowers, dinner, laughter, the whole bit.  Shooting at them normally isn't a way to make that happen.  I'm just sayin'.  Of course the usual suspects are blaming it on guns.  Yeah, I understand he stabbed his first victims to death.   And he drove a BMW.  So there.

In other news, I see that Congress is hammering on the IRS kerfluffle about targeting conservative groups.

Issa and Jordan said in a letter to Holder that investigators want to talk next week to Jack Smith, the section head. The request, they said, came after they learned that a Smith deputy met in October 2010 with then-IRS official Lois Lerner at Smith’s direction “to discuss how the IRS could assist in the criminal enforcement of campaign-finance laws against politically active nonprofits.”

Lerner didn't operate in a vacuum, and as she's lawyered-up and taken the Fifth, maybe it's time to talk to the people that she talked to, to find out what was discussed in thome meetings.  If they lawyer-up, then Congress should start looking at applying the RICO statutes.

Finally, we find that a federal appeals court has held that filming the police is a valid First Amendment activity.  Volokh is all over it. I think, generally, that's the right conclusion, although Professor Reyynolds maintains that filming the police is a due-process right.  I suspect that they're both right.  The police should not object to being filmed in public, while doing their job on the public dime.  Once we get home, take off the vest, hang the gunbelt on the hook, it's okay to expect privacy, but when we're on the street everything we do is subject to scrutiny.

As for Memorial day, I'm going to fire up the pit later and cook some chickens and sausage.  Milady is working today and I'm going to piddle around here until she gets home, then feed her supper and a nice glass of wine.