Comments by Alex J. Ortolano | Eastern North Carolina Now

Great read!

Commented: Friday, November 20th, 2020 @ 9:45 am By: Alex J. Ortolano

It's sort of like the old story about a private business in deep deep trouble. It appears certain that the wheels are off the wagon and all is lost. Then the manager of the business turns from morbid to happy all of a sudden. One employee mentions this change to another employee. The another employee knows what caused the change in the manager's outlook and says to the one employee, "He's found somebody to blame".

Commented: Sunday, August 16th, 2020 @ 7:41 am By: Alex J. Ortolano

It is no contest! There was never a worse call than dat one. If you don't agree, you must not have seen da call.

Commented: Saturday, August 15th, 2020 @ 5:48 pm By: Alex J. Ortolano

Well said, Commissioner!
Smartffella

Commented: Tuesday, April 30th, 2019 @ 9:09 am By: Alex J. Ortolano

Diane, if you think I was saying Trump was the problem, you missed the humor & the sarcasm. The name of my blog is Foolishness...Or Is It? Read it again
FellaO

Commented: Sunday, September 23rd, 2018 @ 2:47 pm By: Alex J. Ortolano

First Point...
Every Talking Head is saying the Demlibs are against Kavanaugh. The truth in they are seeking to continue to get the Supreme Court to allow them to make law that they can't get enacted through the Legislative Process. The truth is they would be this hysterical toward any nomination of President Trump.

Second Point...
The awful climate we live in today dictates that Kavanaugh must say he did not do it. Too bad he can't say was underage and, if he had been processed through the court system at the age, his record would have been sealed for all time. Since he was not processed through the court system, he can spend his whole life doing the right thing and it can all be swept aside. It's like, if you make a mistake at 17, you might as well waste the rest of your life because nothing you will ever do or accomplish will be able to erase the Age 17 Mistake.

Third Point:
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman
Sept. 3, 2018 5:35 p.m. ET (I underlined a bit that stuck me.)
The Appointments Clause provides that judges, including Supreme Court justices, are appointed by the president “with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” From the nomination of John Jay as the first chief justice in 1789 through the mid-1950s, public confirmation hearings were rare. Few nominees attended them when they did occur, and only a handful testified. Senators had no occasion to grandstand by demanding that a nominee declare his stance on legal controversies.

Since hearings became the norm, the number of questions asked of nominees has exploded, with recent nominees facing more than 700 apiece. Yet two aspects of the process haven’t changed. The first is the refusal of nominees to opine on actual or hypothetical cases that may come before the high court. The second is senators’ griping in response. At a 1968 hearing, Sen. Sam Ervin (D., N.C.) bemoaned that the nominee, Judge Homer Thornberry, had “virtually created a new right not found in the Constitution, which might well be designated as the judicial appointee’s right to refrain from self-incrimination.”

Ervin was wrong. Judges are appointed to exercise the “judicial power.” As per the Constitution, this involves deciding specific “cases” or “controversies”—that is, concrete disputes involving real facts, as opposed to abstract questions of law. Judging, in turn, entails the application of law to the facts of a particular case. The facts matter greatly: The way in which the circumstances of a given case can be distinguished from one in the past or one in the future is often what creates the basis for a legal rule, because it is that distinction that becomes legally material.

Judges don’t decide cases in a vacuum or through divine inspiration. They do it in the crucible of adversarial testing. Appellate judges read the parties’ briefs. They hear the lawyers’ arguments. They review the precedents and the factual record. Then they piece it all together, rendering a decision that, in Justice Ginsburg’s formulation, “should turn on those facts and the governing law, stated and explained in light of the particular arguments the parties or their representatives present.” Opining on a legal question divorced from the context of a particular case is not judging at all. It is speculation, a guess as to what the right rule might be.

Commented: Friday, September 21st, 2018 @ 9:20 pm By: Alex J. Ortolano

Let's see if I understand how Hello Alfred works...OK I don't understand. I'll start again. If I paid $279 per month to have Hello Alfred, he (is he a "he" or an "it"?) would come in and do everything for me. Here I pause to let that sink in. I am finished pausing...That means I am left with nothing to do. Here I pause to let that sink in. I am finished pausing...I think life would be downright awful without something to do. Hold on a minute I'm thinking again. Ah yes, the Hello Alfred people said that you would be left with only the things you love to do. I wonder, if I paid $379 per month, I could get Hello Alfred to do the things I love to do? That means I am left with nothing to do. I think life would be downright awful without anything to do.
I'm gonna quit now. I always quit when I confuse myself.

Commented: Friday, August 10th, 2018 @ 9:17 am By: Alex J. Ortolano

Too bad the Electoral College is not understood by so many of us.
Thank heaven our founding fathers were smarter than we are.
If they were not, we could save a lot of money & effort during campaign season.
The 2 candidates would have to only go to New York and California to campaign.
The Republican Candidate would save even more money because he could not bother going to New York & California.

Commented: Sunday, March 18th, 2018 @ 11:09 am By: Alex J. Ortolano

As for me, I am worried because of what Geraldine Jones (aks: Flip Wilson) told me many years ago... "Honey, a lie is as good as the truth as long as you get somebody to believe you."
I need some help here. I gave up my Cable/Dish Service (I had Dish) many months ago. I won't be able to see how CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, etc. cover the Highly Anticipated Fake News Awards tonight. Will someone watch for me and let me know how they handle it?

Commented: Thursday, January 18th, 2018 @ 1:57 pm By: Alex J. Ortolano

My question to one of these Affirmative Action Mental Midgets...
You have a very serious form of brain cancer. You need a very serious operation to remove your rapidly growing tumor. You are given a choice of a brain surgeon who was affirmatively pulled into brain surgery school and, while there, he struggled as he tried to get through his courses. Or would you like to be operated on by the surgeon who was always first in all his academic efforts before and during his time in brain surgery school. Think carefully. Who would you pick?

Commented: Friday, November 24th, 2017 @ 8:03 am By: Alex J. Ortolano

I have never heard any hint of scandal about Fats & I don’t want to hear any now.
If any of you hear something that terrible about him like he was the rabbit that attacked Jimma Carter, don’t tell me.
I wanna remember him singing his latest release/hit (they were all hits) to Louie, Leon & I as we did our best to try & sell Sno Balls for a nickel a piece for Uncle George.
Tears come to old eyes when I remember walking those 10 blocks back home trying to step on those rocket roaches that dashed across the banquette in front of me.
I kept a tally of my highest number killed in that 10 block walk.
I wish I still had that piece of paper.
You know something? I never gave it a second thought that I could have been mugged.
AlexO
Lagniappe: "Banquette" is New Orleans talk for "Sidewalk".

Commented: Tuesday, October 31st, 2017 @ 8:03 am By: Alex J. Ortolano

Your Mom & Me...
Regarding finishing what you start, my oldest Daughter met me after my work day in the doorway of our bedroom in Milwaukee to tell me that she had just survived her first day of Accounting Class & wanted me to tell her it was OK to drop Accounting because she did not like it. I told her she could not drop because she could not know after one class whether she liked it or not. Today she is a CPA & she loves Accounting. Father Knows Best...Or does he?

Commented: Tuesday, October 31st, 2017 @ 7:34 am By: Alex J. Ortolano

Are we being ruled by The One Guy? In this case it was not 1 but 3 (3 out of 6. If the complaint rate was 3 out of 3, that would be 100% but it would still not be a lot. 3 out of 68 will never be a lot but, in today's environmental reality, 3 appears to be 2 more than what is necessary to get a qualified educator removed.
If 3 students would come forward and said they disagreed with the opinion of the 3 offended students, would that get the university back to square one? Then the rulers of the university would only have to find a fourth to tip the Educational Scale of Feel Good in the "correct" direction.

Commented: Friday, July 21st, 2017 @ 7:50 am By: Alex J. Ortolano

Good posting!
You ought to go a bit easier on our crack highway construction bureaucrats.
If they told us when the project would start, we would expect the project to start when they told us it would start and Brother-In-Law Road Construction Inc. might not be ready because he is still working on the last construction project that his Brother-In-Law in the State Legislature sent his way.

Commented: Sunday, July 16th, 2017 @ 3:55 pm By: Alex J. Ortolano

And then there was Henny Youngman.
He did not have to curse to be funny & he was funnier than all the cussing "comedians" we have today.
I once saw Buddy Hackett live in Las Vegas.
The first word he spoke into the mike (very loud & close) was the F Word.
His act went down from there but there was a lot of cussing & his silly audience thought he was funny.
Back to Henny Youngman...
Late in his career he found he could not tell Ethnic Jokes (such a shame), so he started telling Dumb Guy Jokes...
Two dumb guys decided to go bear hunting.
They got up early & headed out to where the bears were.
They came to a fork in the road with a sign that read "Bear Left".
So they went home.
Why do I know so much about Henny Youngman?
That's because I read his autobiography, "Take my life, please".

Commented: Sunday, May 14th, 2017 @ 2:09 pm By: Alex J. Ortolano

Is this link (beaufortcountynow.com) supposed to go somewhere? If it is, it doesn't. If it's not, ignore this Comment...
Readers who pay close attention (1%) to my articles sometimes follow the links in the article to gain more facts. Since I realize the most people don't follow the links, I often just include them to enhance my argument as shown below:
beaufortcountynow.com

Commented: Thursday, May 11th, 2017 @ 11:09 am By: Alex J. Ortolano

Bobby or Tony,
Reminds me of the old one where a guy goes to his Doctor and says, "Doc I think wine, women and song are getting the best of me. I guess I'm going to have to give up singing." (Sounds like something Henny Youngman would have said. If he hadn't, I bet he wished he had.)

Commented: Monday, April 24th, 2017 @ 7:40 am By: Alex J. Ortolano