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Saturday, May 30, 2009
Pravda Criticizes USA for Being Too Radical
Posted by on 5.30.09 @ 8:00AM
It is difficult not to be filled with a powerful sense of foreboding when Russia's Pravda Online editorializes about the tragic descent of America into radicalism under the Obama administration.
Although I don't agree with everything in the piece and it contains some errors (e.g. Barney Frank is a member of the House of Representatives, not the Senate) here are some of the more spinetinglingly creepy passages from Stanislav Mishin's commentary titled "American capitalism gone with a whimper" published by the media outlet that grew out of the original official propaganda organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party:
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. [...]
The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe. [...]
Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.
So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.
Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper... [...]
The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.
The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.
Bjorn Lomborg on the Climate-Industrial Complex
Posted by on 5.30.09 @ 2:00AM
Danish enviro-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg had an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month.
He's right to say that much of corporate America is pushing for draconian carbon emission controls because visions of dollar signs are dancing in their heads. They are more than happy to eat U.S. tax dollars in order to supposedly save the planet.
I would go farther than that. I would say that they are recklessly indifferent to whether the new energy taxes they support --whether they be direct (carbon taxes) or hidden (cap and trade)-- will harm America.
At Capital Research Center we've been following the destructive lobbying of U.S. big businesses on this issue for some time.
Timothy P. Carney profiled the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) for us in the June 2008 edition of Organization Trends. Fred Lucas detailed the efforts by Al Gore to feed the global warming hysteria in the August 2008 Foundation Watch and also looked at the efforts by Goldman Sachs to cash in on that hysteria in the October Foundation Watch. In the August 2007 Foundation Watch Deborah Corey Barnes spotlighted Al Gore's environmental scaremongering business.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Paleo on Paleo Violence
Posted by on 5.29.09 @ 4:59PM
Pat Buchanan's take on Sonia Sotomayor is closer to mine than Daniel Larison's. Though mine might be a little more nuanced.
Not Dead Yet
Posted by on 5.29.09 @ 4:55PM
Some New Hampshire citizens try to live up to their motto.
Everything's a little bit weirder in New Hampshire.
Felons Voting, Black Panthers Skating
Posted by on 5.29.09 @ 10:42AM
These might be of interest:
The news side of the Washington Times fully developed a story that some of you out there have done a good job of raising: the Black Panther voter intimidation story.
Frankly, this should be a HUGE story.
Our editorialists
opine on it.
No, onto Sotomayor, here's
another really good angle (if I do say so).
The Evolution of David Brooks
Posted by on 5.29.09 @ 10:05AM
David Brooks last month: "There is no such thing as philosophy."
David Brooks today: "Therefore there is also no such thing as judicial philosophy."
I'm hoping that David Brooks next discovers a philosophy of opinion to disprove so that he can give up writing these nonsensical op-eds.
Daily Must-Reads
Posted by on 5.29.09 @ 9:58AM
- Sam Shulman's much-debated gay marriage piece (Weekly Standard)
- Greg Mankiw is becoming a champion of common sense in this time of economic madness. His latest: "if Obama wants to 'spread the wealth' he also has to tax height (Greg Mankiw)
- China does urban planning a little bit differently. As in, they destroy cities with people they don't like (Think Markets)
- Mark Thoma has been keeping tabs on a very interesting debate over African aid (Economist's View)
- Ben Smith on Sotomayor at Princeton (Politico)
- GE is running a racket and getting away with it (DC Examiner)
Debating Sotomayor with Shuster and Melber
Posted by on 5.29.09 @ 9:56AM
I'll be on MSNBC Live with David Shuster today at 11:10 (or sometime thereafter, given cable's quirks). We'll be discussing the Sotomayor nomination and whether she's actually Hispanic, whether she's actually qualified, and whether Antonin Scalia, somewhere back in the family tree, may actually be Mexican.
Ari has a post on Kos here indicating a desire to elevate the discourse, which I'm happy to try to help on, but frankly, how do you get an elevated discourse on having someone come on on the basis of their ethnicity, moreso than their qualifications? No really, I wonder, where does this leave the opposition?
The Obamanomics Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Posted by on 5.29.09 @ 6:45AM
You've got to hand it to MSNBC. It takes a lot of moxie to look at an economy shedding jobs, with unemployment and interest rates rising, and come up with the headline: "Evidence mounts that recession may be ending."
In March 2008, I attended a panel discussion where an economist for a private investment firm explained that rising bankruptcy rates pointed toward an impending financial crisis -- which was exactly what happened six months later. At last night's annual gala for the America's Future Foundation, I ran into the same economist, who shook his head and said of the current policy, "They're trying to re-inflate the bubble!"
Ultimately, however, this policy will yield higher interest rates or inflation, or perhaps both. The Wall Street Journal explains what's happening:
Bond markets continued to gyrate Thursday after a sharp run-up in 10-year Treasury yields the day before. The bond market pushed yields of 10-year Treasurys down to 3.674% from 3.70% Wednesday, but they remain well over mid-March's 2.5% level. Yields on mortgage-backed securities continued to climb, pushing 30-year fixed-rate mortgages to 5.44%, the highest since early February.
The Fed has embarked on a massive effort in recent months to buy Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities, a bid to drive up their prices and push down yields. It aims to keep borrowing costs low, hoping cheap mortgages in particular will spur the still-weak economy. . . .
So far, the Fed has purchased $130.5 billion of the $300 billion in long-term Treasury debt it began buying in March. It also has bought $481 billion in mortgage-backed securities and has said it could buy as much as $1.25 trillion worth.
In other words, the monetary dog is chasing its fiscal tail -- a can't-miss formula for stagflation. Pity the investor who is foolish enough to rely on MSNBC to stay informed about economic news.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Lawmaker Demands Probe of ACORN's Finances
Posted by on 5.28.09 @ 7:35PM
House Judiciary Committee member Steve King (R-Iowa) is demanding congressional hearings about the twisted finances of the radical activist group ACORN.
"This spider web, this myriad web of ACORN dollars and revenue streams, every bit of them should be looked at, all the corporations that they are networked with all of the boards of directors of those corporations, the inner locking connecting, the faces that are the same from board to board," King said.
I explored this very topic at length in the November Foundation Watch.
King's call came the same day that Judicial Watch released a pile of documents from the Department of Commerce. The documents show internal communications at Commerce regarding ACORN and the U.S. Census Bureau.
Meanwhile, Kevin Mooney of the Washington Examiner tried to attend a meeting at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and was denied entry by an ACORN spokesman. The meeting attended by representative of various left-wing groups was organized to come up with a PR strategy to deflect attention from ACORN's corruption.
Color by Numbers
Posted by on 5.28.09 @ 6:44PM
Daniel Larison disagrees with my earlier posts, concluding with my point about reversing Sotomayor's comment: "I suppose it would be, but then the point here surely ought to be that the statement is not racist no matter which way you phrase it." Okay, here is how a reversal of the statement would read: "I would hope that a wise white man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina who hasn't lived that life." The title of the speech? A "White Judge's Voice." (Or maybe a "White Judge's Burden.")
I am willing to bet that most people would regard the above statement as racist. If criticizing Sotomayor means we don't get white judges who talk like this, even really conservative ones appointed by Republican presidents, I'm not really sorry about that. Sotomayor's case is obviously more nuanced -- there actually is a Latin culture and identity of which she is a part and entitled to celebrate, while a white person talking about the richnes of his whiteness (as opposed to his Scottish, English, Italian or even Southern heritage) is living in a white nationalist fantasy world -- but as the country grows more diverse, the concepts of particularly white, black, and brown colors of justices become even less desirable. Sotomayor does not have to be an actual separatist or anti-white racist to contribute to a style of judging where race looms larger in our country's legal system.
Plenty of what's in Sotomayor's speech is innocuous, but not her repeated attempts to portray color-blind justice as impractical. The practical result of eliminating color-blind justice will not be that all Americans celebrate their rootedness in unique, decentralized communities instead of being deracinated, atomistic individuals. And in terms of political norms, refraining from criticizing Sotomayor will not keep conservatives from being called racist when they criticize immigration policy, racial preferences, or anything else that gets conservatives called racist. Has it worked like that anywhere in the real world where liberals talk like Sotomayor? I doubt it does at Berkley.
Sotomayor's "Snippets'
Posted by on 5.28.09 @ 4:29PM
“Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs did not say as he tried to spin away Judge Sotomayor’s emphatic statements about the superiority of appellate judges’ policymaking and the inferiority of white males’ decisionmaking. Gibbs did, however, repeat the “snippets” defense previously used to explain Mrs. Obama’s first time pride in her country and Rev. Wright’s roosting chickens. Will it work out as well for Sotomayor as it did for Wright?
Sotomayor’s
“Snippets”
By Asher Embry
Those YouTube “snippets” lie, we’re told,
So don’t believe what you behold.
With that Gibbs starts to spin away;
Says Sonia didn’t mean to say:
Appellate courts make policy
And white men judge far worse than me.
While Sotomayer said it plain,
The White House's playing games again.
Pretends the “news loops” shed false light,
Just as they did with Reverend Wright.
Though Gibbs will try to raise some doubt,
We all recall how that turned out!
He’ll say we must contextualize,
Or misconceptions will arise.
Her praise of court-made policy?
He says it drips with irony.
About that I’m superior thing
Which seems to have a racist ring?
Read on, he says; you’ll quickly see
She’s simply used hyperbole.
We fear we know the great allure,
Of Sonia Sotomayor:
Precisely that these quotes ring true
About the things as judge she’ll do.
Diversity and empathy --
The end result, no doubt will be
Decisions where she'll intermix
The law with racial politics.
Regardless of how hard Gibbs tries,
We’re sticking with our “lying eyes.”
(You can read more of Asher Embry's Political Verse at www.politicalverse.com.)
Word to the Wise
Posted by on 5.28.09 @ 3:14PM
One other point about Sotomayor's comment: it illustrates the extent to which the logic of racial/ethnic identity politics can cause people to say or think things they would clearly recognize as racist in other contexts. If changing the words "Latina" and "white man" around would change your view of the sentence, then perhaps it is time to examine some of your assumptions.
Toomey Gains on Specter
Posted by on 5.28.09 @ 2:46PM
A new Quinnipiac Poll shows Pat Toomey trailing Arlen Specter by a mere 9 points, 46-37. This is down considerably from an earlier deficit of 20 points. The story is leading the local newscasts in Pennsylvania.
Sotomayor the Wise
Posted by on 5.28.09 @ 1:38PM
Just to follow up on Jim's post, I think the problem with the benign interprtation of Sonia Sotomayor's controversial Berkeley speech is that she wasn't just candidly acknowledging that Latina roots would lead a judge to reach different conclusions than a while male counterpart, but "more often than not reach a better conclusion" (emphasis mine). That's a very important distinction.
It's true that Sotomayor's position becomes a bit more nuanced if you read on to the point where she says, "I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires." But that still doesn't explain away the earlier comment.
Text of the full speech is here.
Judging Sotomayor
Posted by on 5.28.09 @ 12:08PM
There's been pushback, even among some conservatives, against criticizing Sonia Sotomayor for her actions in Ricci and her "wise Latina" comments. In the former, it is argued that she merely followed the law. In the latter, she was merely saying that she was, like all of us, a product of her background and experience, which will necessarily have some impact on her views. Needless to say, I disagree.
First, let's understand that the main criticism of Sotomayor on Ricci has not focused on her application of Title VII. (Though originalism does not mean mindlessly upholding 50 years of judicial liberalism. The Warren Court, for example, was a long time ago -- a lot of what were once innovations are now precedents.) She has been criticized mainly for participating in an effort to deny the firefighters' claims the widest possible hearing. Why? Possibly because the case shows the routine effects of "disparate impact" diktats in an unfavorable light. One hopes it's a question she'll answer -- or even be asked -- during her confirmation hearings.
Second, few people object to Sotomayor invoking her biography as a Puerto Rican woman who came from a disadvantaged background in the Bronx to graduate from Ivy League schools and become a federal judge. To reduce her full Berkley remarks to an inoffensive paean to experience and the limits of impartiality strikes me less as a fair-minded reading than an exercise in wishful thinking. But in any event, her remarks should not be divorced from the context in which they were delivered: she was speaking to a multiculturalist audience as a represenative of a judicial liberalism inclined toward group rights. It is appropriate to use her nomination as an occasion to debate that conception of justice.
Moreover, the demographics of this country have reached the point where racialist and separatist statements by nonwhites who aspire to high office have to be held to the same standard as those of whites. That doesn't mean pretending that white men today have it as bad as blacks did under Jim Crow or whining about white victimhood. But it does mean that, as a matter of political norms, racial statements that would be inappropriate for a white man to make should be considered inappropriate for others to make.
We are confronted with an approach to judging that, while stopping well short of full-blown critical legal theory, sees itself as helping designated victim groups overcome designated oppressor groups. Obama's statements about the judiciary illustrate this more clearly than Sotomayor's. As bad as the prattling about "empathy" is, this is a very selective empathy. Empathy is merely a code word for judicial liberalism. And Sotomayor is clearly a judicial liberal.
One more thing: Nominees say things that will help them get confirmed. Just because you can find quotes where judicial liberals talk about upholding the law rather than legislating from the bench and judicial conservatives talk about their empathy for puppy dogs and how they never, ever thought about Roe v. Wade before doesn't mean we aren't talking about different judicial philosophies.
Dragon Lady
Posted by on 5.28.09 @ 10:36AM
By now you've surely seen the story, splashed by Drudge, of Nancy Pelosi letting a certain nasty little kitten out of the bag with "Every aspect of our lives must be subject to inventory" in the fight against Man-made global warming. In China, no less, so talk about preaching to the choir.
Ms. Pelosi justified her curious priorities of going to China to talk about that pressing issue -- and possibly a mutual defense pact against Spectre, the Loch Ness Monster and Rodin -- at the expense of peripheral issues like human rights in her trademark say anything style. She simply asserted that, by hectoring on global warming -- which all draft international and domestic enterprises demand that it be mostly the U.S., with no meaningful sacrifice by world's-largest CO2 emitter China, that's supposed to sacrifice in order to pretend we're controlling the weather -- she is talking about human rights. Tell that to the prisoners, ma'am.
Anyway, what you may not have seen yet is the quite relevant Chapter 6 in Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Uses Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed, "Big Government: How Government, Politicians, and Alarmists Abuse Power in the Pursuit of Power". It is there that I detail the greens' wistful descriptions of China as the kind of system that's necessary to make their stalled agenda reality.
Which if you think about it is pretty much what Pelosi was really saying.
Daily Must-Reads
Posted by on 5.28.09 @ 9:58AM
- Apparently running the country into the ground is pretty hilarious (Politico)
- Robbie George: the champion of intellectual conservatism's comeback? (Weekly Standard)
- Straight from the libertarian's mouth: more pro-life folks means less politicalization of abortion (Reason)
- Yet another "one idea that caused the financial crisis" (New Yorker)
- Obamacare is a disaster waiting to happen (The New Atlantis)
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
ACORN Allies Scheme to Distract from Corruption Allegations
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 11:35PM
Was this photo taken at Shining Path headquarters? (just kidding) Disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke (left) and ACORN enabler Drummond Pike (right) in an undated photo taken in Peru. On the wall is a large poster of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. (photo: Pike's blog)
* * * * *
John Podesta's left-wing Center for American Progress Action Fund has invited many liberal and radical groups to a meeting Thursday morning to discuss how to use rhetorical misdirection to take the focus off ACORN's increasingly well publicized corruption. One of the groups, Alliance for Justice, is advertising the crisis management meeting called "Reframing the Attack on Voter Registration" on its website. The intrepid investigative journalist Kevin Mooney of the Washington Examiner reports
Nearly a dozen left-wing advocacy groups are meeting Thursday at the Center for American Progress (CAP) to discuss how to respond to a growing barrage of damaging news reports and editorial criticism of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform (NOW). The strategy meeting at the liberal think tank is being described as a “briefing and discussion” on how to respond to the negative coverage. ACORN is currently under investigation for voter registration fraud and related allegations in at least 14 states. Among the organizations expected to attend the strategy session are: Advancement Project, Alliance for Justice, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Center for Community Change, Common Cause, Fair Elections Legal Network, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and People for the American Way. Bertha Lewis, billed as “ACORN's new chief organizer and CEO,” is a featured speaker. [...]
Lewis is the ACORN executive who lied to Lou Dobbs on CNN last month. Lewis can't stand controversial Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio and she said he claimed to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. As Newsmax reported:
What Arpaio actually said was that whenever he tried to enforce U.S. immigration laws, activists on the left accused him of being a racist, like a member of the Klu Klux Klan. He then went on to say he didn’t let the insults bother him.
Lewis refused to back down from her malicious lie, which is not surprising because when confronted, ACORN officials routinely lie, lie, and lie some more. I suspect that ACORN and its allies will play the race card. Useful idiot Adam Serwer of the American Prospect summed up last fall what they're likely to say in coming days:
The allegations against ACORN are part of a tangle of misinformation and insinuation that is being played out across the media, and within the Justice Department. ACORN, because of its advocacy on behalf of low-income and minority families, and its efforts to register voters in poor and minority districts, has become a focus for the right's racial anxieties.
They'll say conservatives and Republicans are sinister, racist scum who don't want minorities to vote, and all the negative publicity is the result of a vast conspiracy that originated among scab health care workers on the planet Klendathu who all belong to country clubs that frown on same-sex marriage unless it's solemnized by a non-union pastor who dines on endangered species and who enjoys maximizing his carbon footprint, yada yada yada, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
We've heard this fanciful narrative before but the difference is now a surprisingly large segment of the population is paying attention to ACORN's illicit activities.
Re: Biography Over Brains
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 10:08PM
Even if some non-conservatives are making that charge, I don't think questioning Sonia Sotomayor's intelligence is a productive way for conservatives to oppose her nomination, becuase it's a rather subjective and arbitrary standard that can easily be refuted by her defenders. Sotomayor came from a poor background in the South Bronx and not only attended Princeton but managed to graduate with the highest honors there and go on to Yale Law School. Even with affirmative action, she could not have achieved what she has in her life if she weren't a smart person. Put another way, I don't think her biography would have been possible if she didn't have brainpower. Conservatives barked when Clarence Thomas, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, etc. were portrayed as dumb out of ideological spite, and I don't think the right should go down that path with Sotomayor.
Some may grant that Sotomayor is smart by most normal standards, but not super brilliant in the way we have come to expect of Supreme Court justices. Liberal law professor Jonathan Turley, for instance, said her decisions demonstrated a "lack of intellectual depth" and warned liberals that her record does not suggest she would be the intellectual equal of Scalia. But if this turns out to be true, isn't that a good thing from a conservative perspective? Would conservatives have preferred that Obama appoint a really brilliant and pursuasive liberal who could go toe-to-toe with Scalia, flip Kennedy on key votes, and write decisions that would profoundly shape the Court?
As for Jennifer Rubin's suspicion that, "it won't be an easy confirmation," I really don't see what would give her that impression based on what we know now. Senate Republicans, who only control 40 seats to begin with, have been publicly deferential since the pick was announced and there's no reason to believe Democrats are wavering.
Jeb Bush Jr., Huckabee Back Rubio vs. NRSC's Crist in FL Senate
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 8:31PM
Blogger Carolyn Tackett was the one who tipped me, and it is confirmed by The Hill and CNN. This is a huge victory for the grassroots against the Beltway GOP elite.
Socialist Sales Tax May Be Coming to America
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 8:30PM
The Washington Post reports that a national sales tax, embraced by some because it would prop up the faltering social welfare state, is gaining fans in Congress.
We'll see how far lawmakers like Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota) who think such a tax would be a good thing for America get with the proposal.
"There is a growing awareness of the need for fundamental tax reform," Conrad said. "I think a VAT and a high-end income tax have got to be on the table."
The paper describes a VAT, or value-added tax, as "a tax on the transfer of goods and services that ultimately is borne by the consumer. Highly visible, it would increase the cost of just about everything, from a carton of eggs to a visit with a lawyer. It is also hugely regressive, falling heavily on the poor."
I suspect such a tax, depending on how it is administered, might actually provoke civil unrest in America because consumers would quickly tire of shelling out extra for everything or virtually everything they purchase. The beauty of income taxes, from the statist point of view, is that they are generally withheld at the source, and so income earners don't feel the same kind of pain at the loss of money they never had in the first place.
Europeans and Canadians may put up with this burdensome tax scheme but my guess is Americans would not.
Meanwhile, Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity has a good summary of the ramifications of bringing a national sales tax to the U.S.
Biography Over Brains
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 5:01PM
Citing Dana Milbank, of all people, acknowledging that the choice of Sonia Sotomayor was one of "biography over brain," our friend Jennifer Rubin makes a number of excellent points over at Contentions. Her closing line is right -- but only if some of our lickspittle, spineless senators on both sides of the aisle join the vertebrate species of the Earth -- namely, that "Whatever this is, it sure isn’t post-racial politics. And I suspect it won’t be an easy confirmation."
Read the whole thing. And hail to Jennifer.
Finally, while we are at it, may I recommend our editorial at the Wash Times today on the same subject?
Newt's Tweets
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 2:44PM
Newt Gingrich has followed Rush Limbaugh in calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist, based upon her 2001 statement, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." CNN Sucks notes in its political blog:
On Wednesday, Gingrich tweeted: "Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman.' new racism is no better than old racism."
Moments later, he followed up with the message: "White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw."
President Obama's spokesman Robert Gibbs was asked about Gingrich's charge, and he responded:
"I think it is probably important for anybody involved in this debate to be exceedingly careful with the way in which they've decided to describe different aspects of this impending confirmation," Gibbs said.
Be careful or what? Tell us what will happen to those who want to express their opinions about this, Gibbsy.
And don't try to convince us that there are "oh so many other great aspects of this appointment" to consider other than Sotomayor's ingrained racism and incapability to mete justice out with blindness towards race, religion, class, etc. Carrying Newt's point a bit further, had a white male nominee expressed his superior experience to a Latina woman's, there would be no discussion about the other "aspects" of his "impending confirmation."
The Tyranny of the Obvious
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 1:53PM
In my latest commentary for the Acton Institute (the best Catholico-Evangelical-Hayekian think tank you ever saw), I try to warn public policy makers away from "the tyranny of the obvious" and "wishing makes it so" tendencies in governing.
Here's a clip:
Ronald Reagan gave birth to a long boom when he successfully repudiated the Keynesian economics and punitive marginal taxation that had come to characterize the American approach to running the economy. By doing so, he restored prosperity to a nation mired in the twin crises of unemployment and inflation and wondering whether the presidency was simply too big for one man. His formula of stimulating the economy through tax cuts rather than government distribution of centrally-confiscated dollars fueled increases in American productivity and thus provided the nation with a basis for real wealth generation.
There is an important lesson to be learned from Reagan’s boom. Practioners of public policy should be required to memorize it: Beware the tyranny of the obvious.
When Reagan took office, he brought with him a message Jack Kemp had been proclaiming ahead of time like some John the Baptist of the beltway. The message was counterintuitive, but incredibly powerful. What was it? You can cut taxes, and if they have been too high, you will actually gain revenue. The “obvious” answer is that Reagan was wrong. Higher taxes mean greater revenue, don’t they? In fact, it is still an article of faith among many leftists that Reagan’s tax cuts led to spiraling deficits and a mounting national debt. In this case, however, the faith is misplaced. An empirical examination shows that Reagan’s massive tax cuts led to real (inflation-adjusted) gains in federal revenue. Lower rates mean more incentive to earn and less incentive to cheat. At the same time, the sea change in tax policy put the fundamentals in place for long term economic growth. In short, what seemed obvious (cutting taxes would lead to disaster for a government already sorely pressed financially) was clearly incorrect. Reagan derailed the express that heads for the place where all empires end: high taxes and empty coffers.
Threat from Formerly Mainstream Media
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 12:44PM
The CNN Sucks Web site teases its headline story today, "GOP walks fine line in opposing Sotomayor," with this:
The Republican Party risks further alienation from Hispanics by challenging the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, who would become the first Hispanic, and third woman, on the Supreme Court.
If you read the story you quickly discover that CNN should have written the GOP "risks alienation from liberal Hispanics...." Meanwhile the network at the same time has issued an unveiled threat to Republicans that if they oppose Sotomayor, then CNN will target them.
Credit Bureau Tyranny
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 10:55AM
Scrub, scrub, scrub at their mistakes...sometimes it still won't come off.
Thinking Like Kathleen Parker
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 10:49AM
Does Ms. Parker have an editor? In today's column she writes:
When Rahm Emanuel said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," he wasn't the first or the last to express the sentiment. George W. Bush was accused of taking advantage of Americans' post-Sept. 11 terror to expand executive power.
Could somebody tell her she can't think straight? The second sentence doesn't follow on the first, unless being accused of something is synonymous with expressing support for that something.
The Sotomayor Fight
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 10:29AM
I share the traditional view that elections have consequences and that the president should get to have his appointments confirmed as long as the nominees aren't corrupt or blatantly unqualified for their positions. At the same time, the confirmation process of a high-profile position such as a Supreme Court justice is an opportunity to illuminate the consequences of elections. In the case of the Sotomayor appointment, while she's likely to coast through the Senate given the Democrats' sheer numbers, the American public needs to understand why this is such a radical pick. The Obama/Sotomayor idea that judges, instead of making impartial rulings based on the law and the Constitution, should base their decisions (at least in part) on their own experiences and ethnic background, is outrageous. It is perfectly appropriate for Republicans and conservatives to make this point, and there's no reason why they can't do so in a respectful manner. In short, the upcoming Sotomayor fight isn't really a fight about whether she should be confirmed -- Republicans pretty much lost that one last November -- it's a fight about whether Obama gets to define Sotomayor as a "moderate."
Daily Must-Reads
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 10:21AM
- Sotomayor and lifting up Justice's blindfold (Washington Post)
- Just how much religious liberty would the gay rights movement take away? It's up to them (NRO)
- The economics of "going green" (Econlog)
- John Taylor thinks that government debt poses a greater threat than the financial crisis (Financial Times)
- The Great African Aid Debate gets a little dirtier (Economist's View)
- The limits of judicial objectivity (Crunchy Con)
- Wishful thinking? "Conservatism is in good shape...just not the GOP" (Weekly Standard)
- Two young, attractive(?), ambitious congressmen from across the aisle (The American Prospect)
Holtz-Eakin Trashes Heritage, AEI
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 10:13AM
Liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias notes that the top economic advisor to John McCain's failed presidential campaign, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, is whining again:
Holtz-Eakin is . . . developing a proposal for a new think tank that he describes as a "Center for American Progress for the right" - a reference to the liberal think tank that has supplied staff and policy proposals to the Obama administration and developed new ways to market its ideas. . . .
The irony, of course, is that the Center for American Progress itself was developed as a liberal answer to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that has been a source of Republican policy ideas for decades. But Holtz-Eakin says established think tanks of the right, like Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute, were "not helpful" during the McCain campaign because they weren't politically engaged or innovative in their media strategies.
Or maybe conservative think thanks weren't "helpful" because John McCain didn't take their advice, because John McCain is not a conservative. Loser.
Chu Roofing
Posted by on 5.27.09 @ 12:05AM
The White House was aware that U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu would call for flat-topped roofs (both current and new construction) to be painted with white reflective paint. Chu made the remarks on Tuesday at a conference of Nobel laureates in London. "[Chu's] press people said there wouldn't be much press coverage," says a White House aide familiar with the vetting of Chu's trip.
Chu claimed that a government plan to mandate white reflective roofs would achieve the environmental equivalent of pulling all of the world's cars off the road for eleven years.
Chu indicated that government regulations would most likely have to require construction firms and developers to paint the flat roofs of building white, and slanted roofs colors that would reflect heat and energy.
A Democratic staffer working on the House Energy and Commerce Committee says that such a policy could be tied to federal housing financing through HUD aid or via tax credits to encourage homeowners to renovate their homes' roofs with new materials that reflected heat, and the proposal could be included in the upcoming global warming legislation.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Sotomayor the Radical
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 10:57PM
I never in my life thought I could possibly see a Supreme Court pick as bad as Sonia Sotomayor. Barack Obama is quite clearly trying to upend all the underpinnings of American society in order to create his own version of a Brave New World. Government takeovers of banks and car companies, firings of executives, politically based decisions on which individual car dealerships remain open, world tours apologizing for supposed American sins, mollycoddling our enemies while insulting our friends, broken promises about transparency combined with selective release of classifed documents to serve political purposes.... and so much more, and now.... THIS. He nominates the most radical possible choice for the Supreme Court, a woman whose speeches and writings are so obscenely racialist that no white male could possible get away with saying anything like those things and live, professionally, for even a single additional day. Obama's emphasis today, in introducing Sotomayor, on biography over all else was absolutely sickening. And despicable. To which all decent Americans ought to respond: No, it does NOT make a difference whether she grew up rich or poor, black or white or Hispanic, left-handed or right-handed, ill or healthy, Jew or gentile. All that matters is whether or not she will uphold her oath to serve the Constitution and laws as written, including the explicit and tacit restrictions therein on judicial authority. In America, judges are not supposed to be fonts of wisdom, not supposed to "feel" the right things and not supposed to be demigods purveying some sort of cosmic notion of fairness. Instead, they are supposed to apply the laws as provided to them by the political branches within these United States. Period. As Justice Potter wrote in a famous dissent, later echoed by Clarence Thomas, a judge's duty is not to decide whether or not a law is wise or fair or even whether it is "uncommonly silly." His duty is just to do what the law says, and let the political branches change it if its silliness or unfairness is manifest.
Obama has invited a war over the very meaning of being an American, a war over whether government still is legitimate only if and when it is based on the duly determined consent of the governed. This is a war for our civic souls. We dare not lose it.
Protectionism Backfiring
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 10:42PM
Protectionism always is presented as a means to save jobs, even though the cost is usually extraordinary. Trade barriers are highly inefficient and, depending on the type, often deliver much of the protectionist price surcharge to foreign producers. Consumers always lose far more than workers in affected companies gain.
But protectionism doesn't even save many jobs. It seems that foreign countries--surprise, surprise!--aren't willing to stand idly by as their products are blocked from the U.S. market.
An outcry from the US's trading partners saw the bill amended at the last minute as the White House urged that it not contravene existing trade agreements. Some businesses and officials say that amendment is proving virtually meaningless in practice.
More than a third of the stimulus money is being disbursed by states and local authorities, which are not party to free trade accords such as the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Canadian manufacturers complain that their goods are being shut out of contracts funded by the US stimulus even though Canada is party to NAFTA, which prohibits discrimination.
In retaliation, some Canadian municipalities have passed "Do Not Buy American" resolutions to shut out US-made goods. That has rattled some exporters. Texas manufacturer JCM Industries told the Financial Times that it might have to lay off workers if the situation worsened.
Pennsylvania-based steel company Duferco Farrell has warned it might lay off 600 workers after its biggest client said it would cancel orders because Duferco's goods, some of which have to be partly produced abroad, were not Buy American compliant.
What was that about good jobs for American workers? So much for the helping hand of government!
Where Does Sotomayor Stand on Abortion?
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 7:57PM
It is widely and understandably assumed that Sonia Sotomayor is pro-abortion. But Steven Waldman points out that we actually don't have much evidence of her opinion:
After the announcement of Sonia Sotomayor's selection, abortion groups lined up predictably, pro-life groups expressing outrage and pro-choice offering praise. Everyone seems to be assuming she's ardently pro-choice, if for no other reason than that Obama's appointed her.
But there's stunningly little information about her abortion views - and what we do know hardly paints her as a pro-choice activist.
She's ruled on only three cases indirectly related to abortion and in each case she took the position preferred by the pro-life forces, albeit for reasons unrelated to the merits of abortion.
The conventional wisdom probably is true. Still, one can always hope (dream?) of a liberal appointee who turns out to be unexpectedly sound on one of the worst constitutional decisions ever.
Ross Douthat, Concern-Troll?
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 6:35PM
Ross Douthat doesn't know it, but his column this morning was written in 1772. Justus Moser took a harder line in "On the Diminished Disgrace of Whores and Their Children in Our Day" than Douthat does in "Liberated and Unhappy," but I suppose it's easy to be brave when you've been dead for two hundred years.
Moser, like Douthat, was concerned about rising illegitimacy rates but, unlike Douthat, he was willing to do something about it -- specifically, he wanted to keep in place the guild rule that required apprentices to have been "conceived by honorable parents in a pure bed." He doesn't necessarily want to return to the days when mothers who drowned their infants were repaid in kind, he says, but he does acknowledge that, if we want to disincentivize the otherwise very attractive behavior of getting it on no-strings-attached, we'll have to be mean to the people who engage in that behavior. Otherwise, we can count on more bastardy, which leaves everyone worse off.
This line of argument inspired this snark from John Holbo: "Oh yes he did. He concern-trolled the humanitarians. With a sack of drowned whores. You can say that you saw it on Mulberry Street."
Douthat, like Moser, assumes that everyone can agree that "the steady advancement of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women":
Here the public-policy options are limited; some kind of social stigma is a necessity. But a new-model stigma shouldn't (and couldn't) look like the old sexism. There's no necessary reason why feminists and cultural conservatives can't join forces - in the same way that they made common cause during the pornography wars of the 1980s - behind a social revolution that ostracizes serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors as thoroughly as the "fallen women" of a more patriarchal age.
This, of course, is a little concern-trollish, too -- who is Douthat to tell Catharine MacKinnon, et al., what a real feminist would do?
The real feminists, of course, have turned up right on schedule to tell Douthat that, if he were really on their side, he'd join feminists in supporting their two favorite methods of reducing single motherhood: abortion and the Pill.
And that's the real problem with Douthat's column. The old ways of stigmatizing unwed motherhood have disappeared; therefore, we ought to come up with new ways to re-stigmatize it; it is true-though-not-obvious that in order to do that, we have to come down one way or another on birth control.
After all, what Douthat doesn't know is that the feminists have been stigmatizing single motherhood, just not in a way that would please him. A line from Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip:
"Did you and the last honest man get loaded on Jägermeister and forget that there's, like, five hundred different kinds of birth control?"
You're pregnant on your own -- what, were you drunk or something?
That kind of stigma works, but presumably the conservative half of Douthat's alliance couldn't really unite behind it. This leaves Douthat in a corner from which there are a limited number of ways to escape. If he doesn't like the feminist paradise of unlimited contraception (and therefore, presumably, unlimited sex with negligible unwed motherhood), then he'll have to save women from the "unhappiness" of single motherhood some other way. Marry earlier? Fine, but the delayed adolescence of college makes that difficult to manage. Also, women who marry before they establish their careers are left particularly vulnerable by no-fault divorce. If Douthat accepts late marriage as a social given, then he'll have to create an America in which "thirty-year-old virgin" isn't a punchline.
(Of course, the interesting question is this: Between the world we have, where single motherhood is on the rise, and the world feminists want, where there is very little single motherhood but contraception is near-universal and so is casual sex, which bothers Douthat more? I would guess the latter, which makes his attempt to cozy up to feminism that much stranger.)
Either way, Douthat can't stigmatize single motherhood and contraception and abortion without putting forward some controversial moral vision, one that attacks late marriage, easy divorce, mothers with careers, or some combination of those. And, whatever his vision ends up being, my guess is that Catharine MacKinnon won't like it.
Sotomayor's Radical Legal Group Helped Kill the Estrada Nomination
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 5:20PM
President Obama's radical new nominee to replace Associate Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, used to serve on the board of LatinoJustice PRLDEF (White House backgrounder), one of the racial grievance groups that helped to sink the judicial nomination of Honduran-born Miguel Estrada in 2003.
Along with groups such as the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), LatinoJustice fought a war of attrition against President George W. Bush's 2001 nomination of conservative Miguel Estrada, a Honduran-born immigrant, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Democrats in the Senate filibustered the nomination and a weary Estrada withdrew from consideration in 2003.
Today LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit, hailed the nomination of Sotomayor on the basis of her ethno-cultural heritage. "As the second largest and fastest growing population in America, with a large pool of qualified individuals to choose from, it was wholly appropriate for the president to nominate a Hispanic," the group said in a written statement. (PDF)
According to the group's website, it gets some of its funding from George Soros's Open Society Institute.
A search of philanthropy databases reveals other significant donors to LatinoJustice to be Carnegie Corporation of New York ($1,025,000 since 2000), Ford Foundation ($2,280,000 since 2001), Rockefeller Foundation ($1,275,000 since 2000), and JPMorganChase Foundation ($70,000 since 2001).
Among radical left-wing groups, it has a fairly garden-variety agenda. A captive of identity politics, it pushes for enforced multiculturalism, diversity, bilingual public education, race-based gerrymandering of electoral districts, race-based employment quotas, tenants' rights, and illegal immigrants' rights.
LatinoJustice PRLDEF was known as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund until last year when it filed Articles of Amendment with New York State to change its name. (See pages 35 to 41 of its IRS Form 990 for the group for Tax Year 2007.)
In Other Legal News..
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 3:20PM
Rush on Sotomayor
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 2:45PM
Not one to mince words, here's what Rush had to say on Sotomayor:
She is a horrible pick. She is the antithesis of a judge, by her own admission and in her own words. She has been overturned 80% by the Supreme Court. She may as well be on the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals, given all the time she's overturned. She has been reprimanded by a truly strong Hispanic judge, Jose Cabranes. She has been rebuked in writing by Cabranes for opinions that she wrote that had no bearing on the constitutional issues before her in the case that was being decided. Details on that coming up. But here is why, even though she may not be able to be stopped, here is why Sonia Sotomayor needs to be opposed by the Republicans as far as they can take it, because the American people need to know who Barack Obama really is, and his choice of Sonia Sotomayor tells everybody, if we will tell the story of her, who he is.
He got up in his announcement and said everything about her that isn't true, that she's a great constitutionalist; that she doesn't use personal opinion; that she understands what her role is and the oath is of a Supreme Court justice. She has done just the opposite of that. She is a hack like he is a hack in the sense that the court is a place to be used to make policy, not to adjudicate cases, not to adjudicate constitutional law but to make policy.
The test is whether or not Republican leadership will aid in the crucial hearings in a way that adequately shows who this woman is as a judge. They have to do this skillfully, without looking like they're just out to stop Obama's pick because she's Obama's pick. And they have to do it without worrying about the Hispanic vote.
My Benchside Manner, Of Course, Was More Inspired By "Night Court"
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 11:57AM
From the Huffington Post's "Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court Nominee: All You Need to Know":
She left for the U.S. District Court in 1992. At the time, Sotomayor told the New York Times that she was inspired to become a judge by an episode of "Perry Mason."
"I thought, what a wonderful occupation to have," Ms. Sotomayor said. "And I made the quantum leap: If that was the prosecutor's job, then the guy who made the decision to dismiss the case was the judge. That was what I was going to be."
Well, just because "The Decider" wasn't popular doesn't mean "The Dissmisser" will face the same fate. Best of all, Sotomayor wouldn't have the same ethic or gender disabilities that plagued Mason's career. And, despite what Jeffery Rosen's sources may tell The New Republic or the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, we've seen--as previously alluded to in this post's title--that people can change for the better once in a hallowed courtroom.
Early Republican Sotomayor Roundup
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 10:53AM
The initial Republican reactions to the Sotomayor nomination are mostly nocomittal, though they tend to emphasize the Senate's role in the confirmation process. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sens. Jim DeMint, Richard Shelby, and Saxby Chambliss have already weighed in. So has Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference. Since I don't see his brief statement online, I'll reproduce it here: "It is the Senate's responsibility to give the president's Supreme Court nominee both respectful and rigorous scrutiny. The nominee should neither be pre-confirmed nor pre-judged."
So What Does the Constitution Matter, Anyway?
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 10:34AM
It's long been evident that the Constitution has only minimal relevance to American governance. Most everyone seems to believe that the natural born requirement means Arnold Schwarzenegger can't be elected president, but not many other provisions are taken seriously.
One such rule is that no legislator can be appointed to the Cabinet if he or she was in office when Cabinet salaries were raised. Two decades ago the Justice Department took a principled position in interpreting this provision. No longer under Attorney General Eric Holder -- who also doesn't believe that "state" really means state for the purposes of congressional representation.
Relates my Cato Institute colleague Ilya Shapiro:
Now, in the most recent development in the "Is Hillary Clinton Constitutional?" saga the OLC reversed its own position from 1987 just in time for federal prosecutors to file a motion to dismiss a lawsuit challenging Clinton's appointment that cites the new memo (see footnote 21). Indeed, the motion was filed the same day Acting Assistant Attorney General David Barron -- who had previously rebuffed Holder on the DC Voting Rights Act (though we still have to see what the next confirmed OLC head says, be that Dawn Johnsen or someone else) -- signed the new OLC memo.
The issue is that Clinton's appointment to the cabinet -- as well as that of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar -- violates the Emoluments (sometimes called Ineligibility) Clause of Article I, section 6 because both she and Salazar were sitting Senators when cabinet salaries were increased. Congress later passed short laws reversing these raises for the duration of both officials' tenures but, as I've argued previously - and as OLC head Chuck Cooper spelled out in the 1987 memo -- there is no "net accounting" proviso which somehow erases the constitutional defect. While the new memo relies heavily on historical practice -- several presidents going back to William Howard Taft (most recently Bill Clinton in appointing Lloyd Bentsen to be Treasury Secretary) have proceeded in this manner - the fact that political branches have acted in a certain way doesn't speak to the constitutionality of that action.
In short, again the Obama Justice Department has found a politically expedient way of dealing with pesky constitutional issues. In this case, that way involved issuing a memo to buttress a motion being filed that very same day in federal court.
People typically hire lawyers to give them the answers they want, not the right answers. President Barack Obama obviously has hired just such a lawyer with his appointment of Eric Holder as Attorney General.
Richard Epstein on Sonia Sotomayor
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 9:59AM
Obviously, President Barack Obama is intent on giving us a lot of empathy and not much jurisprudence.
Observes Richard Epstein of Chicago University Law School:
Evidently, the characteristics that matter most for a potential nominee to the Supreme Court have little to do with judicial ability or temperament, or even so ephemeral a consideration as a knowledge of the law. Instead, the tag line for this appointment says it all. The president wants to choose "a daughter of Puerto Rican parents raised in Bronx public housing projects to become the nation's first Hispanic justice."
Obviously, none of these factors disqualifies anyone for the Supreme Court. But affirmative action standards are a bad way to pick one of the nine most influential jurists in the U.S., whose vast powers can shape virtually every aspect of our current lives. In these hard economic times, one worrisome feature about the Sotomayor nomination is that the justices of the Supreme Court are likely to have to pass on some of the high-handed Obama administration tactics on a wide range of issues that concern the fortunes of American business.
We have already seen a president whose professed devotion to the law takes a backseat to all sorts of other considerations. The treatment of the compensation packages of key AIG executives (which eventually led to the indecorous resignation of Edward Liddy), and the massive insinuation of the executive branch into the (current) Chrysler and (looming) General Motors bankruptcies are sure to generate many a spirited struggle over two issues that are likely to define our future Supreme Court's jurisprudence. The level of property rights protection against government intervention on the one hand, and the permissible scope of unilateral action by the president in a system that is (or at least should be) characterized by a system of separation of powers and checks and balances on the other.
Here is one straw in the wind that does not bode well for a Sotomayor appointment. Justice Stevens of the current court came in for a fair share of criticism (all justified in my view) for his expansive reading in Kelo v. City of New London (2005) of the "public use language." Of course, the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment is as complex as it is short: "Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." But he was surely done one better in the Summary Order in Didden v. Village of Port Chester issued by the Second Circuit in 2006. Judge Sotomayor was on the panel that issued the unsigned opinion--one that makes Justice Stevens look like a paradigmatic defender of strong property rights.
We've barely finished four months of the Obama administration. The ride is likely to get a lot wilder very soon.
Has Sonia Sotomayor Paid Her Taxes?
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 9:51AM
The question we all want answered.
The Cost of Illegal Immigration
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 9:32AM
Contra Richard Nadler, no one of any significance has argued that people's human value should be determined by how much they pay in taxes versus what they get in government services. What people, whose immigration-policy views look suspiciously like Nadler's, have argued is that low-skilled immigration -- legal and in some cases illegal -- will help the government's fiscal situation. This does not appear to be true.
Sources Say Sotomayor for Supreme Court
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 9:28AM
Don't repeat this blog post title if you have a severe lisp. Sources are telling the Associated Press that Sonia Sotomayor will be President Obama's choice to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court. She will add to the court's diversity, but follow in Souter's footsteps as a reliable liberal vote but lacking -- according to some liberals -- the intellectual firepower to go up against Scalia.
Conservative Bar Brawl: Mark Levin vs. Dreher, Friedersdorf, Frum,et al.
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 6:16AM
When I invoked this analogy, I didn't expect that Mark Levin himself would come wading into the online saloon fight, but he does just that at Dan Riehl's blog:
Every now and then I have to lower myself to deal with the undeveloped minds of kooks like Rod Dreher. . . . Rod learned of me, he says, from his friend Conor Friedersdorf. Honestly, who is Conor Friedersdorf? . . . If only the rest of us would embrace the "true reformers" (you know, in addition to Frum, David Brooks and Ross Douthat, among others), we would be so much the better. Dare I say if they were intellectually coherent and consistent, not to mention principled, it might be easier to understand them. But they are, with a few exceptions, ineffective lightweights who shoot spitballs at conservatives from the backbenches. This is precisely why the media promote them during their little hissy fits.
They're The Republicans Who Really Matter, you see. You can read Levin's entire rebuttal, and Friedersdorf actually pops into the comments at Riehl's blog with this:
I notice that you don't address the substantive criticisms that I make, instead merely pointing out that I am not very well known. Of course, my fame isn't relevant to the flaws in your rhetoric. The fact that you're unwilling to defend yourself on substance leads me to believe that you're unable to do so.
Ah, the old "substantive criticisms" gambit! Levin, who served as Ed Meese's chief of staff, must defend in detail everything he says during 15 hours of weekly radio time against whatever specific criticism any blogger might make, or else be presumed indefensible.
It is at times like this that the famous words of Rahm Emanuel come to mind, but perhaps the words of Friedrich Hayek might be more helpful.
ACORN as Left-Wing Terrorists?
Posted by on 5.26.09 @ 1:59AM
After Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano quietly dropped the DHS report that labeled all conservatives, libertarians, and returning soldiers as potential right-wing terrorists, commentator Chris Carter wonders if ACORN, whose members use physical intimidation and force to stop foreclosures, ought to be labeled left-wing terrorists.
It seems like a fair question especially considering that Bruce Marks, head of NACA (Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America) does the same thing as ACORN does. Marks proudly describes himself as a "banking terrorist."
Monday, May 25, 2009
America: The Next Banana Republic?
Posted by on 5.25.09 @ 8:28AM
As we attempt to spend and borrow our way to prosperity, America's currency and financial reputation continue to fall.
The U.S. dollar slid against most major currencies Wednesday, hitting a five-month low of US$1.3775 against the euro and pushing the Canadian dollar up US1.21¢ to a seven-month high of US87.69¢.
John Curran, the senior corporate dealer at Canadian Forex, said the U.S. dollar would likely fall further in the next week, with the Canadian dollar likely reaching about US88.35¢, at which point it could break higher to test the US92.35¢ level.
"The U.S. dollar is continuing to slide as investor appetite is gaining momentum," Mr. Curran said. "People are getting comfortable about taking on a little more risk."
The rise in the Canadian dollar has moved in lock-step with the improvement in equity markets since March 9. Over this time, the S&P 500 has risen by 34%, the S&P/TSX composite index has gained 35% and the Canadian dollar has increased by 14%, equal to almost US11¢. Since Feb. 18, light-crude oil has risen by 46% to US$62.12.
But as risk appetite and equities improve, Mr. Curran said it was unlikely the U.S. dollar would embark on a long-term decline.
"While things are beginning to thaw, it doesn't mean it's full-on summertime just yet," he said. "A lot of people are looking for the Canadian dollar to strengthen dramatically again towards par. I'm not sure about that just yet."
Nevertheless, concern has been mounting that the increasing U.S. debt load, as well as a potential inflation time bomb in the form of the quantitative easing, could drag down the greenback. Garnering attention is the risk the United States could lose its triple-A sovereign credit rating, which reflects the chance of the borrower defaulting on its debt.
"By many measures, the U.S. appears just a few short steps away from losing its coveted triple-A status, unless the recovery turns out to be considerably stronger than expected and the fiscal repair is faster than commonly expected," said Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Capital Markets. "A downgrade could boost the cost of funding U.S. debt at the margin, but underlying inflation and fiscal fundamentals will ultimately be the primary driver."
We've got a deficit of about $2 trillion this year. At least $1.2 trillion next year. About $10 trillion in expected red ink over the coming decade. Then there's Medicare and Social Security going bust.
Enjoy the coming financial ride!
Bear Stearns Collapse Unveils War History Nugget
Posted by on 5.25.09 @ 8:11AM
The New York Times has a story today about how Donna Reed's daughter, who worked for the investment company until it collapsed last year, took some time afterward to dig into an old trunk of her mom's memorabilia from the World War II era. She learned that her mom also played a role as a pinup girl for many of our soldiers, not because of her sex appeal, but because of her public persona:
At 84, Edward Skvarna is retired and living in Covina, Calif. But in 1943, he was fresh out of high school in a mill town near Pittsburgh, newly enlisted in the Army Air Forces and training in Kansas to be a right gunner on a B-29 when he met Ms. Reed at a U.S.O. canteen and asked her to dance.
“I had never danced with a celebrity before, so I felt delighted, privileged even, to meet her,” Mr. Skvarna recalled in a telephone interview this month. “But I really felt she was like a girl from back home. She was from a smaller community, and we were more or less the same age, so I felt she was the kind of person I could talk to.”
Very cool story, especially for today.
Military Credentials for President?
Posted by on 5.25.09 @ 7:43AM
Washington Examiner columnist Gregory Kane says, in criticizing Barack Obama, that he would not vote for anyone for president who has not served in the military:
But for those who opt for the career path that leads from Harvard Law to community organizing to state senator to U.S. senator, I expect one thing: Don't come before me years later running for president, in essence asking to be commander-in-chief of a military force you didn't think was worthy of your commitment.
Maybe I'm just funny this way, but I would never, under any circumstances, vote for a presidential candidate who had no military experience, either as an officer or an enlisted man or woman. I have a laundry list of reasons why I didn't vote for Obama; his passing on military service is in the top three.
Obama promised the graduates that he'd only "send them into harm's way when it is absolutely necessary." That promise would mean a lot more coming from a president who'd experienced at least some of the rigors of basic training.
Fair 'nuff. So long as Kane applies the same rules to Republicans. You know, like Richard Cheney, who said "I had other priorities" in explaining his five deferments during the Vietnam War. And in a race between John Kerry or Al Gore versus Richard Cheney or Newt Gingrich (or any of the many other leading Republicans who never served), Kane would either vote for Kerry or Gore or remain neutral.
While there's reason to value military service in political leaders, making the standard absolute might not have the result Kane expects.
John P. Murtha: Busy Protecting the Public Interest
Posted by on 5.25.09 @ 7:05AM
It's good to know that Rep. Murtha has worked so hard to protect the public interest. Reports the Washington Post:
Over the past five years, a local defense contractor with close ties to Rep. John P. Murtha, a Democrat who has represented southwestern Pennsylvania for three decades, has selected several small police departments in the region to receive $10 million in Justice Department grants.
The company, Mountaintop Technologies, was selected by the lawmaker in a series of earmarks to hand out and monitor the grants. As it distributed the money to the departments, the firm would explain each time that it was arriving through the largess of Murtha -- often just before fall elections.
Once she learned from the investigators that Monongahela's police department was getting money outside of normal channels, City Clerk Carole Foglia was disturbed.
"I wasn't happy with the situation at all," Foglia said. "I didn't want to be involved in anything that was done improperly, because that's not the way I work in my office. And this was improper. No question about it."
The tale of how a defense company ended up getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to distribute federal police grants is a chapter in a larger story of Mountaintop Technologies, its far-flung operations and its dependence on Murtha. The Johnstown firm has received at least $36 million in the past eight years in earmarks and military contracts, without competition and with the backing of Murtha, the powerful chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee. It also hired the lobbying firm where Murtha's brother worked.
Just a little coincidence, that last bit. It's good that the Democrats have inaugurated a new era of political reform and responsibility.
Obama Funny Money
Posted by on 5.25.09 @ 1:20AM
Long live PhotoShop and Adobe Illustrator!
Let's take a look at some of the Obama funny money now showing up online.
From Enter Stage Right:
From Conor's Fundraising Blog:
From Uptown Flavor:
From the People's Cube (may be ordered from the People's Cube, an excellent satirical website):
And this one from Light of Liberty seems especially appropriate given that the Obama administration and congressional Democrats conspired to repeal the Clinton era welfare reforms by burying repeal language deep in the February stimulus legislation:
But this one which substitutes the ACORN logo for the seal of the U.S. Treasury as posted at the Berman Post is my favorite so far:
It won't be so funny when America --and the world-- is crippled by the coming hyperinflation that Obama's policies will cause. In the end the joke will be on us.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
New Jersey Race Gets Puffy
Posted by on 5.24.09 @ 9:52PM
Oh New Jersey Republican Primary. Will I ever tire of you? No, likely not.
Everyone gets one of these stories, I guess. A puff piece where they talk about those formative earlier experiences that shape you as a person, as a candidate, as a policy maker. The title here is, "Christie: A need to lead, honed by family and success," which, by way of literary merits, lacks that thing writers refer to as rising action. I put the article through my fact-finding machine with an eye toward "actual achievements helpful to New Jerseyans," or "key elements of his core philosophy."
Which is why I never really get these pieces. John Edwards got one heck of one from Matt Bai back in 2007, including such lines as:
Everything else in the campaign, Edwards seems to think, all these carefully orchestrated photo ops and drop-bys and van rides with the media, is the kind of empty political theater from which he declared himself liberated after his last presidential run. He gives the impression that he simply endures it.
Yeah. Okay. We all saw the video of the combing.
Anyway, back to Christie. What is the message of the Christie campaign? A fighter against corruption, a man with the management experience and the political capital necessary to defeat Jon Corzine. Okay. So let's see where we encounter Chris Christie, fighter of corruption. Oh. Here:
He has seemed at times to bristle at questions about some of his decisions as prosecutor -- like the multimillion-dollar monitoring contracts he gave to former attorney general John Ashcroft and to the New York prosecutor whose office decided not to charge Christie's brother, Todd, in a stock fraud investigation -- but insists he recognizes it's part of the election gantlet.
That's it. That's all the profile concludes about his time as attorney. That he has had to suffer through reasonable questions (that remain pretty unclear) about his record as a U.S. Attorney. The rest of the profile focuses on Christie's political ambition:
"From the day we all met him, we knew he was a leader," said Anthony Della Pelle, a classmate and friend of Christie's since both were boys.
... By his senior year in high school, Christie had been elected class president six times. Twice that year he was picked to attend student leadership programs in Washington, meeting legislators and cabinet members and visiting the White House.
... It was in his senior year of college that Christie, then the president of student government, began dating Mary Pat Foster.
... Bush's decision to nominate Christie as U.S. attorney stirred unprecedented opposition, particularly from New Jersey attorneys who considered his appointment the worst kind of political patronage.
...[T]he principal at Livingston High School while Christie was there, said he always assumed Christie wanted to run for governor. ... "Just knowing Chris and his ambition and his love of politics, I just automatically thought of the top slot -- because he usually aspired to the top slot," Berlin said last week from his home in New Mexico.
In other words, Christie appears to have been pushing to be in power for much of his life. His first big break was a nod from the president for a position for which he wasn't entirely prepared -- he had never been a prosecutor before. And Christie's prosecutorial and ethics record must be especially bad, considering how little of that record gets mentioned.
The puff piece for Lonegan came out earlier this month, offering insights into how Lonegan's struggle with his blindness and meager beginnings led to a passionate drive toward self-improvement, and ultimately, a firm political philosophy ("The Carter-era economy of stagflation didn't help, and Lonegan swears he could sense the difference when Ronald Reagan took office"). While certainly not hard on Lonegan either, far more time is dedicated to clueing in a reader to what a Lonegan governership would look like.
Yet the Christie puff piece spends 300 words on high school baseball as some sort of allegorical closer. We learn that Christie and his high school baseball team are planning on having their next reunion at the governor's mansion. A man with a plan, indeed.
Russell Kirk and Christian Ghost Stories?
Posted by on 5.24.09 @ 8:20PM
I’ve been reading the stories in Russell Kirk’s Ancestral Shadows collection. They are chillingly full of awful justice. Highly recommended for the Christian supernaturalist., the preserver of the old ways, and even the libertarian who likes to see meddling bureaucrats get what's coming to them.
Powell the Cretin
Posted by on 5.24.09 @ 1:32PM
Gen. Colin Powell was on Face the Nation today, trashing the Republican Party again, as if he has some particular moral authority. I beg to differ. Colin Powell has almost as little moral authority as did the bystanders in the Kitty Genovese rape case. While his own administration, and especially a very good man named Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was being raped by Patrick Fitzgerald's out-of-control investigation into the Valerie Plame leak, Powell and his top aide Richard Armitage stood by silently even though both knew that Armitage had been (without malice aforethought) the actual source of the leak. To let Libby (and Karl Rove and others) twist in the wind for so long when Powell and Armitage knew what had really happened was the stance of either two cowards or, more likely, two vindictive political infighters who cared more about seeing their adversaries (in internal administration disputes) be kneecapped than they cared about seeing justice done and the truth be made public.
And for Powell, who never put himself up for any public election and who never has dealt with fiscal policy, to blather on to the effect that the American people actually want higher taxes and bigger government is for him to show his utter obliviousness about public opinion and about wise management of the public fisc.
I had long been a fan of Colin Powell even while disagreeing with him on social issues. And I have publicly credited him even after the Plame case for something few others have recognized him for, namely his superb diplomacy that brought Pakistan in (originally) as a real ally during the major part of the war in Afghanistan even while not losing at all the U.S.'s growing alliance with India (Pakistan's frequent enemy). So I am willing to acknowledge his contibutions to this nation. But his actions during the Plame imbroglio were those of a cretin. And he has offered nothing positive since then, only criticisms of the sort given by a man settling personal scores. For those reasons, he should stop pushing his mug into public settings. Instead, he should find a nice shady rock, with plenty of crawl space, to use as shelter.
Blasting the Post While Cooling the Warming Hype
Posted by on 5.24.09 @ 12:14PM
The other Washington Times editorial today takes strong issue with a horribly biased WashPost "news" article on global warming. No, there isn't a consensus on it; and yes, there is plenty of evidence that man-made warming isn't occurring. Meanwhile, I should give credit where it's due, because space considerations did not allow public sourcing in the editorial. Frequent Spectator contributor Paul Chesser provided good material for the editorial, as did Marc Morano of Climate Depot. Please read the editorial. It's a case study against media bias and against eco-hysteria.
Praise Our Heroes
Posted by on 5.24.09 @ 12:03PM
This editorial today of ours at the Washington Times was one of the most personally moving I have worked on in a long time (moving to me to research and do the interview, that is). What thousands of Americans went through in Bataan in 1942 should bring tears to any eye. Even more remarkable is the lack of apparent bitterness that people like Ben Steele (featured in the editorial) give evidence of. Interviewed by phone at age 91, Steele is engaging, sharp, and extremely forthcoming. I am in awe at his service, and deeply appreciative of all who serve in our nation's uniform. Tomorrow we remember those who "gave the last full measure of devotion" -- those in all our wars who, unlike Steele, did not return alive. Bless them all. And thank their families.
Home-Schooling Works (Just Ask a Proud Dad)
Posted by on 5.24.09 @ 2:25AM
My 19-year-old daughter, Kennedy Catherine McCain, just completed her sophomore year of college, receiving her associates degree with high honors from Hagerstown (Md.) Community College.
Kennedy still burns with resentment over the single "B" on her collegiate record. After being home-schooled from third through ninth grades, she enrolled at Highland View Academy as a 14-year-old sophomore, graduating with honors at age 16. She would have completed her college associates degree at age 18, had she not spent a year in Argentina in a full-immersion Spanish language program.
Did I mention she is working her way through school, earning money to pay that part of her tuition not covered by scholarships? When I tell people I have six children, they are prone to ask how I expect to pay to send all those kids to college on the meager earnings of a journalist.
Short answer: I won't. The kids can work their way through, like Kennedy does. Also, I've suggested to my sons that they should consider matriculating through the most elite undegraduate program in the nation, the University of Parris Island -- qualifying them for a chance at free travel to exotic destinations like Iraq and Afghanistan -- and then continuing their studies on the GI Bill. My 16-year-old twin boys are somewhat skeptical of that plan, which they fear won't allow adequate opportunity in their preferred fields of study, girls and cars.
Bragging on one's children is an especial joy when the kids are home-schooled, since Kennedy's achievements reflect credit on her mother, who spent seven years teaching our daughter at the kitchen table.
The success of home-schoolers is a refutation to the arrogance of a government education bureaucracy that is prone to assert, with the self-righteeous authority of official expertise, that my kids and the estimated 1.5 million other home-schooled students in America are being deprived of something useful. My only regret is that more children are not similarly deprived.
Since I only skimmed the Department of Homeland Security's "Rightwing Extremist" report, I'm not sure if they listed home-schoolers among the looming domestic terror threats, but at least one prominent anti-government radical is a proud home-schooling dad.
Wayne Allyn Root was the 2008 Libertarian Party vice-presidential candidate and when I saw him last month at the Georgia LP convention, Root spent most his time bragging on his home-schooled 17-year-old daughter Dakota, a black belt in martial arts who also competes in international fencing:
Dakota has been in the sport only four years, but she is considering attending college at Ivy League fencing powerhouses such as Harvard and Columbia as well as Duke, Northwestern and Notre Dame. There appears to be reciprocal interest. . . .
She has achieved scores of 2,240 on the Scholastic Achievement Test (Dakota still hopes to break 2,300) and 31 on the American College Test. . . .
Last November she traveled to Germany and Austria for 16-and-under World Cup tournaments. Dakota fenced especially well in Germany, making the fourth round of pool play.
Showing that performance was no fluke, Dakota in April won under-19 epee at the Pacific Coast Championships in Long Beach, Calif. She was second in the senior epee, which was open to all ages.
That's a head-turning rise through the ranks for a relative newcomer. It's also a rise that could continue, perhaps even to the Olympic Games, with 2016 as the likely target.
Please read the whole thing.
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