Ben Carson: "“The fact that the government owns 2.4 billion acres of land is ridiculous." True enough.

Ben Carson: "“The fact that the government owns 2.4 billion acres of land is ridiculous."

True. It is, in fact, extremely ridiculous, considering that represents 104% of the land mass of the United States!

I'm with Michael Che from SNL. They must have given this guy his medical degree sarcastically.

By the way, if you watched Parks and Rec, you heard Ron Swanson articulate a political point more profound than anything we've heard from the candidates of either party: The Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service are about the only federal agencies actually doing a great job for the country. The National Parks are America's greatest treasures, followed by the many unspoiled and protected areas throughout the country. Why would we want to fuck up the only thing in the country that works properly?

As for the States' Rights argument, as I've pointed out many times, there is virtually nobody in the country who actually gives a rat's ass about States' Rights. People want what they want. If they can get it through federal control, they're all for it. If the feds don't deliver, they haul out the States' Rights chestnut. I think it was Bill Fulbright who pointed out that if Strom Thurmond, the foremost advocate of States' Rights, had lived in Massachusetts, he would have been the foremost opponent of States' Rights.

And frankly, we've been ignoring the Constitution on this issue since approximately the day when the Bill of Rights was written. The Tenth Amendment says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." From the way the country is actually run, you would not think that such a provision existed, and the Supreme Court justices are about as likely to strike down a law for violating the Tenth Amendment as they are to put on cleats and replace the starting nine of the Baltimore Orioles.

Not that the Orioles couldn't use the bats.